Visión después del sermón

Gauguin painted this in 1888 in Pont-Aven, a village in Brittany in the west of France, where he had gone looking for something plainer and older than city life. The women in their tall white Breton caps have just come from a sermon, and what they picture fills the rest of the canvas, the Bible scene of Jacob wrestling the angel. Gauguin does not pretend it is a real field. He floods the ground a flat, unbroken red and splits the picture with a single diagonal tree, so the fight sits clearly inside the women's minds, not on the earth. As he wrote to Van Gogh, the landscape and the struggle exist only in the imagination of the people praying. He twice tried to give the picture to local churches, and both times the priests turned it down.