Vision after the Sermon

Breton women come out of mass with their eyes shut, and the thing they pray about, Jacob wrestling the angel, appears on a field of flat, impossible red.

1. 1
   The red that is not a field

   The entire ground behind and between the figures

   The whole stretch of ground is one flat, saturated red, not grass, not earth, not a meadow at any hour of any day. Gauguin makes the color itself do the work of telling you this is a vision and not the world. Nothing in nature is this red, which is exactly the point: you are looking at what is happening inside these women’s shut eyes, and inside a head there is no rule that the ground has to be green.
2. 2
   A wall of white headdresses

   The foreground, the heads and shoulders of the women

   The tall, starched white caps the women wear are Breton coiffes, the regional headdress, and Gauguin lines them up across the front of the canvas as a rhythm of pale curved shapes against black dresses. They are painted as flat cut-out forms, not rounded with light and shade, so they read almost like a row of paper sculptures, the largest and nearest things in the picture.
3. 3
   The tree that splits the canvas

   A diagonal trunk running corner to corner across the picture

   A single tree trunk cuts on a diagonal straight across the canvas and divides it into two countries: the real one (the praying women, near and low) and the imagined one (the wrestling match, far and high). It is the seam between the world and the vision, drawn as one bold line. (Some readers call it an apple tree and tie it to the Garden of Eden; that is one interpretation, not something Gauguin spelled out.)
4. 4
   The actual subject, shrunk and shoved back

   Upper right area, Jacob and the angel locked together

   Jacob wrestling the angel is, on paper, the holy subject of the painting, the thing the sermon was about. Gauguin paints the two struggling figures small and pushes them up into the far corner, smaller than the women’s heads and backs in front. The sacred event is deliberately made less important-looking than the ordinary people watching it in their minds. This scale-inversion is exactly what got the picture called irreligious.
5. 5
   A cow, wandered in from real life

   Small, near the dividing tree

   A little cow turns up near the splitting tree, a scrap of ordinary Breton field life that has strayed into the holy vision. It is the kind of small, unbothered animal Gauguin liked to leave in: proof that the everyday world keeps going on, cattle and all, even while a miracle is being imagined a few feet away.
6. 6
   Hard outlines around everything

   Every coiffe, face, hand and limb

   Look at any edge: each shape is bounded by a firm dark contour line, with flat color inside and almost no blended shading. This is the cloisonné and stained-glass effect made literal, the dark lines doing the job that modeling and shadow do in ordinary painting. It is what flattens the whole picture into bright sealed compartments of color.