Vision After the Sermon

Vision After the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, 1888) at the Scottish National Gallery is Gauguin's most decisive formal breakthrough — the painting in which he completely abandoned naturalistic representation in favor of a symbolic and decorative formal language. Painted at Pont-Aven in the summer of 1888, it depicts Breton women returning from church, their collective vision of Jacob wrestling the angel from that morning's sermon rendered as a flattened, Japanese-influenced image in brilliant red. The red ground — non-naturalistic, chosen for its associative and formal qualities — was the clearest declaration that color would no longer describe the visible world. Émile Bernard disputed Gauguin's priority in developing Cloisonnism, but the Vision is now recognized as the masterwork of the Synthetist breakthrough. The Scottish National Gallery's acquisition of this canvas placed it within a collection that includes major works from across European painting history, and its importance as the starting point of everything that became Fauvism, the Nabis, and ultimately the full liberation of color in twentieth-century painting makes it one of the most historically significant paintings in any collection.

Gauguin applied paint in broad, flat planes of non-naturalistic color bounded by dark contour lines — a style he called Synthetism. His palette is saturated and expressive: deep carmines, cadmium yellows, tropical greens, and acid blue-purples.