Two worlds in one frame

It is a modest object for so famous a picture, about 2 feet 4 inches tall and 3 feet wide, oil on canvas, the kind of size you could carry under one arm. What Gauguin does inside that small frame is jam two worlds into it and draw the seam between them in a single tree trunk.

In the foreground, near and large, a crowd of Breton peasant women in tall, starched white headdresses (the regional caps called coiffes) and black Sunday dresses bow their heads with their eyes shut. They have just come out of a sermon, and they are praying about what they heard. Behind and above them, small and pushed up into the corner, is the thing they are praying about: Jacob wrestling the angel, the episode from the Book of Genesis where the patriarch Jacob grapples all night with a divine stranger.

And the whole thing happens on a field of flat, saturated red. This is the move that makes the painting. The red is not a meadow, not earth, not a field at sunset; nothing in nature is this red. Gauguin makes the color itself announce that you are no longer in the real world. The praying women are real, standing in real Brittany; the wrestling match is a vision, happening inside their shut eyes; and the impossible red is the color of the boundary between the two. Color here is not describing a place. It is telling you which reality you are in.

A single tree trunk cuts on a hard diagonal straight across the canvas and divides it cleanly: the women and their real world below and near, the vision above and far. (It is often called an apple tree and read as the tree of knowledge from the Garden of Eden; that is an interpretation later viewers added, not something Gauguin himself spelled out, so hold it loosely.) The two wrestling figures are widely said to be borrowed from a print by Hokusai (the nineteenth-century Japanese woodblock master whose prints Gauguin and the Paris painters collected and studied); Bernard pointed out the source, so take it as a credible attribution rather than a proven fact.

Look at the scale and you find the quiet outrage. Jacob and the angel, the holy subject of the picture, are painted small and shoved into the far corner, smaller than the women’s white caps and black backs in front of them. The sacred event is deliberately made to look less important than the ordinary villagers imagining it. Every edge in the painting, every cap, face and hand, is sealed in a dark contour with flat color inside and almost no shading: the cloisonné and stained-glass method made literal. The result is less a window onto a scene than a picture of a state of mind, faith, painted as its own bright, flat, sealed-off zone.