Description
Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel) – Gauguin’s turning point at Pont-Aven
In 1888, at Pont-Aven in Brittany, Paul Gauguin painted a canvas that falls into two worlds: in the foreground Breton peasant women in white coifs kneel in prayer, while on the far side of the tree trunk Jacob and the angel wrestle in a field of vermilion red. The episode from Genesis is not painted as an event that happened, but as what the women see before them after the sermon. The canvas measures 72,2 x 91 cm and is horizontal – a landscape composition in which an apple branch divides the real from the visionary.
What the painting shows
The Breton worshippers are painted from behind and in profile, so the viewer stands among them. Above them spreads a field that is neither grass nor sky but pure red. In the upper right corner two figures lock together: Jacob and the angel. The cow beside the trunk is the only everyday thing left of the real world. Gauguin presents religious experience as something that happens in the believer’s mind rather than in front of the believer’s eyes.
The technique: cloisonnism and flat red
The painting counts as one of the first mature examples of cloisonnism: the areas of colour are bounded by a dark outline and laid flat, without modelling and without depth perspective. The red field is not a background but a surface in its own right, carrying the mood of the whole scene. Colour becomes the carrier of feeling instead of a description of nature, and it is that decision which separated Pont-Aven from Impressionism.
Where the original hangs
The National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh hold the original under accession number NG 1643; the gallery purchased it in 1925. The stated measurement of 72,2 x 91 cm and the medium oil on canvas agree across both publicly available records: the gallery catalogue and the encyclopaedic entry on the painting.
How a hand-painted reproduction is made
We paint the reproduction in oil on canvas, brushstroke by brushstroke, and it arrives on a stretcher frame ready to hang. The demanding part of this subject is the large red area: it has to stay even without going dead, or it loses the tension the original has. Before dispatch you receive a photograph of the painting for approval, and we adjust it further on request.
- Subject: Breton peasant women after the sermon and Jacob wrestling the angel, divided by the apple branch.
- Technique: oil on canvas, cloisonnism – flat colour areas with a pronounced outline.
- Sizes: landscape format, from 40 x 32 cm to 200 x 160 cm; the most frequent choices are 100 x 80 cm and 120 x 96 cm.
- Of note: by tradition Gauguin offered the painting to a church near Pont-Aven and the priest declined the gift; the story is often repeated, but it cannot be confirmed with certainty.
If the same Breton period interests you, see also Breton Girls Dancing, Pont-Aven, where the same white coifs return, together with The Yellow Christ and The Green Christ, in which Gauguin sets the religious motif into the Breton landscape in the same way.
