Paul Gauguin - 'The Vision After the Sermon: Jacob Wrestling with an Angel'

In 1886 Gauguin spent his first summer in Pont-Aven, an international artists’ colony in Brittany. Like others, he was drawn to this picturesque port because not only was it a cheap place to live, but the landscape was picturesque and the models were plentiful. At this point in his artistic life Gauguin was trying to solve the problems faced by most painters at that period who no longer found Impressionism an adequate form of expression.

Industrialisation was already creeping into the life of Pont-Aven in the form of new methods of agriculture. Such an intrusion undermined the popular artistic perception of peasant life as noble and traditional.

Many writers and artists were turning away from the Positivist belief that the only sound basis of knowledge was the study of material reality.

The Symbolist movement in literature and philosophy questioned such claims. Rather than purely recording observations of the world, Symbolists believed art should convey a world of emotions and ideas beyond everyday reality. In painting, this meant using only the basic lines, forms and colours that enabled the artist to reveal the inner meaning of the work.

Trade with the East had brought with it a European mania for anything Japanese. For artists, the Japanese print was greatly admired because of the simplicity of the work and the tendency to avoid three-dimensional illusion. Gauguin would certainly have been familiar with these imported artworks.

Another Pont-Aven artist, Emile Bernard, also influenced by the art of Japan, created a painting, Breton Women at a Pardon. (A Pardon was an annual Breton religious ceremony.)  This painting is also known as Breton Women in a Meadow.

Gauguin greatly admired this work with its absence of both a light source and a vanishing point, as well as a disregard for visual depth. Bernard’s unconventional approach seemed to correspond with Gauguin’s search for a decorative, abstract style to match his imaginative ideas

Interestingly, a similar artistic technique is used in Frank Capra’s film, It’s a Wonderful Life.

After Clarence, the angel, rescues George Bailey from the river after his suicide attempt, the whole scene inside the hut is symbolically divided with a clothes-line to separate the sacred world of Clarence from the secular world of Bailey.

By representing a mystical experience Gauguin broke with realist conventions. The symbolism of the work was criticised by his fellow artists, Pissarro and van Gogh, and made viewers feel uncomfortable.

However, the achievement of Vision After the Sermon was that it represented Gauguin’s long-held belief that art was truly autonomous and could represent complex feelings and emotional meaning.

This dramatic work is important not only because it is regarded as Gauguin’s first masterpiece, but it represented the way in which painting would evolve in the wake of Impressionism.

The Vision After the Sermon can be viewed at National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh.

Sources:

• “Gauguin and Post-Impressionism” by Charles Harrison in Modern Art and Modernism, Manet to Pollock (The Open University Press, 1990)
• Gauguin by Ingo F Walther (Taschen, 2000)