The Vision After the Sermon (Jacob wrestling with the Angel)

Vision After the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel) is an oil on canvas painted by Paul Gauguin at Pont-Aven in Brittany in 1888; measuring 72.2 × 93 cm, it is in the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh (NG 1643).

Gauguin had first worked at Pont-Aven in 1886 and returned in 1888, by then dissatisfied with the Impressionist landscapes of his early career. That summer he met the young Émile Bernard, who was painting in a simplified manner influenced by Japanese prints, and the canvas is often seen as a response to Bernard's Breton Women in a Meadow. With it Gauguin came to be regarded as the leader of the new style called Synthetism, though Bernard later accused him of plagiarism. Gauguin wanted to give the picture to the church at Pont-Aven, but it was refused. He first called it Apparition and settled on the present title in late 1888, when it had to be named for an exhibition.

The subject is the struggle of Jacob with the angel from Genesis 32, seen not directly but as a vision experienced by Breton women after a sermon. An apple tree cuts diagonally across the canvas, separating the women in their white coiffes from the wrestlers. In a letter Gauguin listed his colours: the women's costumes an intense black, the ground pure vermilion, the angel in ultramarine with chrome-yellow wings, Jacob in bottle green, adding that the two bonnets at the right look like monstrous helmets. Flat colour, strong contours and the tilted space draw on Japanese woodblock prints by Hiroshige and Hokusai; Bernard identified Hokusai's sumo wrestlers in the Manga as the source of the struggling pair.

The National Gallery of Scotland bought the painting in 1925 from the English collector Michael Sadler for £1,150, under its director James Caw, at a time when British audiences were still hostile to Post-Impressionism after Roger Fry's exhibitions of 1910 and 1912. In 2005 the gallery devoted a whole exhibition, Gauguin's Vision, curated by Belinda Thomson, to this single work.