Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel)

1888

Oil on canvas, 72.2 × 91 cm. Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh

Women in white caps pray in the foreground while, beyond a tree trunk, a man wrestles an angel. Here he set aside the parallel strokes of his earlier work.

A flat field of unnatural red replaces grass and holds both the women and what they imagine. Vision and real world share one space, with no boundary between them.
Writing to Van Gogh, he explained that the struggle and its setting exist only in the women's imagination.
Look for the small cow at upper left, grazing beside the struggle.
The wrestlers are drawn small and far off, while the women's heads crowd the near edge.
The National Galleries of Scotland bought it in 1925.

The sermon was on Genesis 32, the story of a night-long struggle after the crossing of the river Jabbok. The women wear the regional dress of Brittany.

Image: Wikimedia Commons · PD-Art