Vision after the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel) is an oil painting by French artist Paul Gauguin in 1888.
It depicts a scene from The Bible, where Jacob wrestles an angel. It depicts this indirectly, through a vision or hallucination that the women depicted see after a sermon in church.
As its name suggests, Gauguin's work was concerned with inner rather than external truth. He combined stylized images of Breton figures in a shallow pictorial space with a 'vision' in the top right corner. Thus the 'real' and imagined worlds depicted, are separated by the strong, diagonal of the tree, which was inspired by Japanese prints. Like the Impressionists, Gauguin studied Japanese prints and even adopted their use of bold, flat areas of solid colour. The figures are distributed
unconventionally, cut off and framing the canvas edge at the left and in the foreground. No identifiable source of light is used, a device which looks forward to developments in Fauvism.
Executed between mid-August 1888 and mid-September The Vision after the Sermon marks the transition between two different styles in Gauguin’s development as an artist. Having found that his artistic ideals did not coincide with the Impressionistic ones, Gauguin endeavoured, through his art, to transcend material reality and to attain a more eminent one. As a result, a shift in the choice of subject matter occurred. From the transient scenes which had been the hallmark of Impressionism Gauguin moved to religious themes and The Vision after the Sermon is the first in the series of paintings related to religious subjects Gauguin announced a promising long- term project which was going to result in the association of his name with the term “Symbolism”.
