gauguin’s vision of the sermon -- 4/17/2026

17 Apr 2026

gauguin’s vision of the sermon -- 4/17/2026

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Today's selection -- from Wild Thing by Sue Prideaux. ‘I’ve Never Painted So Clearly':

“In January 1888, Gauguin left Paris for Pont-Aven. He was still not well, and he felt that his best chance to recover his health was to stay at the Pension Gloanec, where he could live cheaply and calmly and be generously fed. Between January and April he spent the majority of the time in bed, feeling sorry for himself and fuming against fate. He was bored, the weather was atrocious; he painted a few snowscapes, he had searing stomach pains and he had no money. Not until July did he feel himself cured, though the gut ache persisted, as it would for the rest of his life. To restore his strength, he took lessons in the boxing salle and the fencing salle, swelling his reputation for cutting a dash. As Pont-Aven welcomed its customary summer migration, Laval joined him, back from Martinique and as devoted as ever. 'For my part, the more I go on, the more I admire your talent, and I feel respect and affection for you. You made me understand the superior strength that permits me to make efforts to grow. I embrace you tenderly as a courageous elder brother who set the example for me.' Laval never forgot that Gauguin had saved him from suicide.

“Up until now, though Gauguin was concerned with infusing his work with spirituality, he had not introduced religious references. In Brittany they were inescapable. While much of France was succumbing to the moral anaesthesia of industrialised capitalism, Brittany still clung stubbornly to muddy-clogs ruralism and a deeply held Catholic faith. During his money-go-round in the City of Gold, Gauguin had hung a pair of wooden clogs on his wall. We see them from time to time in his Paris interiors, sneaky little invaders from pre-industrial times. Now, like the local Brittany peasants, he carved his own.

“Spirituality was as strongly rooted in Brittany as in himself, though he had long turned away from organised religion and the established Church. Moche animism had laid the foundation. On to this, Bishop Dupanloup had grafted the idea that a universal religio-intellectual synthesis was necessary, and this fitted well with Gauguin's own synaesthetic nature. The Breton position was a synthesis of Catholicism, Celtic and Druidic legend, animism and superstition.

Vision After the Sermon

“At the heart of every hamlet and village in the area was a small, squat church built of local stone. Most dated from around 1460 and were erected on the sites of Druid temples beside sacred springs that, according to Roman historians, were the place of Druidic human sacrifice. Following Christianisation, these sites absorbed the Christian symbolism of Jesus Christ the sacrificial victim through whose redeeming blood flowed the water of eternal life.

“Once a year, on the feast day of its patron saint, each of these little village churches was the centre of a unique ceremony called a pardon. It was the most important day in the church's calendar. The pardon had its origins in the ancient Celtic Tailteann Games, dating from somewhere around 1600 BC. Funeral games for the dead, they had included wrestling contests and these had survived down the ages, becoming known in Breton as the gouren. Christianity had transformed the wrestling contest from a slugfest ending in the defeated having his throat cut by a Druid into the representation of a moral conflict at the end of which the victorious wrestler, having proven through his strength that he was the most spiritually pure, was rewarded with a farm animal to swell his herd and his prosperity.

“Human rivers streamed through woods and green meadows from miles around to witness the event, dressed in their best to receive God's pardon for their sins. Snowy coiffes floated above dark dresses like foam on inky water, their white ribbons dancing like spume on the wind. First, they received absolution from the priest. Then they danced a gavotte, a rather formal folk dance, on the levelled area of ground by the church where the wrestling match had always taken place. As they danced, their wooden clogs flattened the grass of the arena which they gathered round to watch the young men of the village renouncing the devil before engaging in the wrestling competition. The champion, in Christian times, was deemed to have proven himself the most spiritually pure young man in the village. His prize, the live heifer which we see in Gauguin's painting tied to a tree during the match, symbolised the conquered opponent of previous times, who had then been sacrificed at the sacred spring.

“This is what Gauguin painted in The Vision of the Sermon. Past and present, reality and imagination, a fusion of the familiar with the magical and strange. Like in his portrait of Clovis asleep, Gauguin is attempting to show an outward and an inward state simultaneously. But he brings a further complexity to the picture as the Vision also tells the Bible story of Jacob wrestling with the angel, a story Gauguin identified with.

“The Breton women gathered for the pardon, dressed in their regional costume, have just listened to the priest on the right (whose tonsured profile some believe to be a Gauguin self-portrait). He has delivered a sermon on Genesis 32:22-32, which tells how the prophet Jacob wrestled all night with a mysterious angel before receiving a blessing from God.

“Gauguin wrote a letter describing the picture to Vincent van Gogh. The landscape and the fight, he explained, were taking place in the imagination of the people. The tree-trunk slashed diagonally across the space divided real space from imagined, the profane from the sacred. (This, if it really is a self-portrait, fixes Gauguin firmly in the spiritual space.) In the real space on the left, the prayerful Breton women stand in the circle to watch the contest. The heifer that is the victor's prize also occupies real space, tied to the tree-trunk. To the right of the tree, the space occupied by the imagination, the vision appears. The boys are transformed into Jacob wrestling with the angel. The wrestlers also, Gauguin says, symbolise himself wrestling with the tough process of artistic creation, and wrestling for the redemption of his life through art.

“The Vision shows Gauguin finally freeing himself from the subordination to appearances and committing to the inwardness of colour, as he had begun to do on Fruit Porters at Turin Bight. The whole scene, not only the imagined, takes place on vermillion ground, unifying the space while striking a fantastical and mystical note. Like the rest of the Vision, there are two ways of reading the red ground: literally and symbolically. Literally, the colour was not totally impossible: the pardon took place on the third Sunday in September, when the buckwheat in the fields turns red. Symbolically, red is the colour of blood and of life, and of intense emotion. The Vision also saw the further development of another motif that had fascinated him ever since his Impressionist days, the tree motif used in the Japanese manner as vertical screen to divide space, as in Fruit Porters at Turin Bight.

"The letter describing the Vision to Vincent included a sketch of the picture, and Vincent used exactly the same compositional device – the diagonal tree bisecting the canvas – in his famous Sower with Setting Sun (1888) which he painted some six weeks later. The Sower is also a religious allegory but one based on Christ's parable of the sower broadcasting the seeds of religious faith, which Vincent saw as symbolising the artist sowing the seeds of the new artistic truth.

“Gauguin wanted the Vision to hang in one of the local churches whose deep history had inspired its creation. He said that he wished to see the synthetic effect the modern piece would have among the rustic Romanesque and Gothic forms within the chapels. He offered it first to the church at Pont-Aven, but the church was in the throes of modernising its interior, so he was not unduly downcast when the priest turned it down. Far more authentic was the Church of Saint-Arnet at Nizon, with its deep, dark interior rich with pre-Christian figures and symbols, overlaid with later medieval paintings, sculptures and carvings. The canvas is quite large, seventy-three by ninety-two centimetres, and a group of his young pupils including Laval and Emile Bernard helped Gauguin to carry it four kilometres uphill through the fields to the Nizon church. There they hoisted the picture up above the door where the vermillion ground darkened to the colour of rich soil, just as Gauguin had envisaged. Pleased at how it looked, he sent Bernard off to the presbytery to fetch the priest to receive the gift. “