A letter to Van Gogh, a parish that said no

Gauguin knew at once he had made something new, and he said so to the one correspondent who would understand. In late September 1888 he wrote to Vincent van Gogh, with whom he was about to go live in Arles in the south of France, and sketched the picture out in the letter: the praying women, the red ground, the wrestling figures. The letter survives, which means we have Gauguin’s own description of the painting from the very year he made it. Among the Pont-Aven painters and the younger circle who would later call themselves the Nabis (a group of Paris painters who took Synthetism in a flat, decorative direction; the name means "prophets"), it became an early banner for the new method.

There is a famous story about what Gauguin did next, and it needs telling carefully, because the bones of it are solid and the details are not. The solid part: Gauguin tried to give the painting to a local Breton parish church, and the church turned the gift down. That much is well attested.

The colorful version, the one usually retold, comes almost entirely from a single account that Émile Bernard wrote down in 1904, sixteen years after the fact. By Bernard’s telling, Gauguin offered it to the priest of a specific nearby parish, who refused it on the grounds that it was not a religious picture at all, objecting that giant peasant bonnets and the backs of villagers filled the canvas while the sacred subject shrank away to nothing. It is a great story, and it is exactly the objection the painting invites, but it rests on one witness recalling it long afterward. So: the refusal happened, take that as fact; the priest’s exact words are Bernard’s memory, not gospel.