Yesterday at the National Galleries I stood for a while looking at this painting, now recognised as a work that finally defined Gaugin's own style, artistic voice and vision. It's called Vision after the Sermon. My first responses to Gaugin have been lukewarm, and I struggle at times to see beyond, or to want to see beyond, the sophisticated way he uses a more primitive style and naive or even crude choices of colour.
I don't think this is a beautiful painting. But it is powerful and arresting, though it presupposes the prior knowledge of the story of Jacob wrestling the Angel of the Lord. As an expression of piety, prayer and how the religious imagination encourages, even compels spiritual devotion, it is a profoundly moving painting. Gaugin loved to paint the Bretons, men in the fields, women at domestic tasks and just as often at prayer.
The use of the tree to divide the people praying from the action taking place off centre, almost off stage, suggests strongly the importance of the real, the imaginary and the ways of bringing them into relationship. The angel figure is ambiguous too - who is going to overcome whom, and what is at stake, and for Gaugin the deeper agitation of what goes on inside the human mind and heart when looking for the meaning and value and direction of life. This is a disturbing not a devotional painting, with its contrast of prayer and struggle, real and unreal, this world and that spiritual world that breaks through with life enhancing or life shattering power.
Whatever else Gaugin's painting does, it takes with unflinching seriousness the awe and dread of some Old Testament stories that make it clear God is not to be messed with, and to encounter the Holy One of Israel is an experience from which at best we will limp away towards the sunrise, blessed but forever changed. "I will not let you go unless you bless me", said Jacob. Gaugin has captured the immensity of what is at stake when we wrestle with angels, when we see beyond the immediate realities of our lives to the reality of God, whose presence and mercy, power and love, challenge and comfort pervades all reality, and with infinite costly patience and struggle persists in His holy and wholesome purposes of redeeming, renewing, reconciling and reawakening to worship, and life and joyous completion, the whole of creation.
Or so it seemed to me as I pondered and go on pondering this strange painting.
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