Edinburgh buys the heresy

Because the church had turned it down, the painting stayed with Gauguin, and after his death in the Marquesas Islands in the Pacific in 1903 it moved through private hands in Europe, by a chain the record does not fully preserve. Its public home arrived in 1925, when the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh bought it.

That was a braver purchase than it sounds. British taste had been openly hostile to Post-Impressionism ever since the English critic Roger Fry put Gauguin, Van Gogh and Cézanne on London walls in 1910 and 1912 and the public recoiled. For a national gallery to spend real money on a flat-red Gauguin in 1925 was to bet, against the prevailing taste, that this odd little picture was a landmark. The bet paid off.

It hangs in Edinburgh now, and it is read as exactly what Gauguin hoped: the first fully Synthetist picture, one of the foundational works of the turn away from Impressionism toward flat, symbolic, emotionally charged color. The line that runs out of it is long, the Nabis who flattened color into decorative interiors, the Symbolists (who wanted art to suggest feeling and meaning rather than illustrate stories), and past them the twentieth-century painters who took for granted that a canvas can be a state of mind rather than a copy of a room. It all starts with some Breton women praying with their eyes shut, and a red that exists nowhere on Earth.