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Paul Gauguin’s First Masterpiece: The Vision After the Sermon
A dream-like image made from a “primitive” artistic impulse
This painting is often thought of as Paul Gauguin’s first masterpiece. As an image that combined the mystical with the everyday, it marked a crucial turning point on his creative path as an artist.
Titled Vision After the Sermon, it was made in 1888 whilst Gauguin was living in the village of Pont-Aven in Brittany, northwest France.
The idea of the painting was this: a group of Breton women, wearing their distinctive ceremonial headdresses, have just heard a sermon read by a priest. The story was of Jacob wrestling with a mysterious angel. Now, after the sermon has finished, the devout women are seeing the sermon before them in the form of a vision.
As Gauguin wrote to his friend Vincent van Gogh during the making of the painting, “the landscape and the fight only exist in the imagination of the people praying after the sermon.”
Notice how Gauguin has cut the composition in two by painting a tree trunk diagonally across the canvas. This helps to separate the painting into…
