Original subtitles

I'm Waldemar Januszczak.

And, for 40 years, I've been looking at art,

writing about art

and thinking about art.

So, I've learnt a lot

and it's all useful...

..because art is full of mysteries...

..and mysteries need solving.

When you think of the great French post-impressionist Gauguin,

you usually think of these kinds of pictures, don't you?

Beautiful views of Tahiti,

with beautiful locals,

having beautiful dreams.

In his Tahiti pictures,

Gauguin takes us to paradise.

He's running away from the real world,

looking for something more alluring,

more exotic,

more colourful.

PLAYFUL POLYNESIAN GUITAR BALLAD

But it's easy to forget that,

when he set off for Tahiti in 1891,

Gauguin was already 42,

so a big chunk of his career

had already happened.

And during this big chunk of his career,

he'd done marvellous things,

painted some haunting pictures

of a kind no-one had seen before.

UKULELE BALLAD

The Vision After The Sermon.

It's good, isn't it?

Painted in 1888 and now hanging

in the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh...

..where its colour and its mystery seem to belong

to another world.

Long before he got to Tahiti,

Gauguin was already dreaming

of faraway realities.

This was painted in Pont-Aven, then in Brittany,

northern France,

and it shows a group of women, in traditional Breton costumes,

praying outside a church.

They'd just heard a sermon

from the priest about Jacob wrestling with the angel

and when they come out of the church that's what they're thinking about.

They're not actually watching the wrestling match.

They're imagining it.

And see this brown bit here,

which looks like a path up the middle of the picture?

That's actually the trunk of an apple tree that's grown up

and which symbolically separates the real world

over here from the imaginary one up here.

LILTING BALLAD

But that's not all that's going on in this haunting

and revolutionary picture.

There's a lot more to it.

And, to understand it properly,

we need to know who she is...

..who he is...

..and what it all has to do with this.

MEDIEVAL GAVOTTE PLAYS

Welcome to Pont-Aven

where The Vision After The Sermon was painted

and where strange folk in strange costumes

do strange things

in a strange part of France.

Why did Gauguin fetch up here?

Pont-Aven was what they call an artists' colony.

Artists from all over the world came here to paint.

Rents were cheap, food was cheap,

and, everywhere you looked,

there were these picturesque, Breton subjects.

In Pont-Aven, artists didn't have to look far for something to paint.

The subjects were everywhere.

The story of Jacob wrestling with the angel

is actually told in the Bible.

On his way home from exile,

Jacob, the founder of Israel,

meets a stranger by a river

and starts wrestling with him.

The stranger is an angel,

but Jacob doesn't know that.

All night long, they wrestle.

Man versus angel...

..human weakness versus divine strength.

So, it's a battle between human desires

and angelic ones,

between the low and the lofty,

and it was very popular in sermons.

Now, I went to a Catholic boarding school,

so, I heard a lot of sermons.

It was generally the most boring bit of the mass.

The bit where you started to doze.

Occasionally, something profound was said,

something that rang a bell.

That is what Gauguin has painted.

ANGELIC VOICE SINGS

Gauguin wasn't the first artist to tackle the great wrestling match.

Delacroix had got there before him.

Man versus angel,

the savage versus the divine.

It's a struggle with which Gauguin was personally familiar.

Because Gauguin went to Tahiti

and led a Bohemian life,

we tend to think of him as being anti-traditional,

anti-religious, but he wasn't.

PERUVIAN FOLK TUNE

Guess where Gauguin grew up?

It was actually Peru, of all places...

..where his grandfather

was nothing less than the last Spanish viceroy...

..Don Pio de Tristan y Moscoso.

Till the age of seven,

Gauguin lived in the presidential palace in Lima...

..where he was exposed

to the especially fierce religious moods of Latin America.

And, later, when he became a painter...

..it always showed.

He had a taste for powerful and primitive beliefs.

It's one of the reasons he came to Brittany to be connected

with something deeper, something more profound.

And the Bretons weren't French.

They were Celts.

They had their own costumes,

their own language,

and their own mysterious past.

Gauguin loved all that.

There's a line in one of his letters to his pal Schuffenecker

where he writes that the sound he wanted from his Pont-Aven art

was the sound of clogs resounding on granite soil.

He was after something primitive and real,

something that spoke to the past

as well as the future.

Now, the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel

was probably the subject of a sermon here at the church in Pont-Aven,

in the summer of 1888.

Now, we're not sure that Gauguin heard it,

but it's likely that he did,

because, at this point in his life,

he was going to church a lot...

CHOIR SINGS

MASS IS SPOKEN

..not because he was a good Catholic,

but because there were other things in the church

that attracted him.

Jacob wrestling with the angel

is a handy symbol for all sorts of struggles,

but it's especially handy as the symbolic encapsulation

of a man wrestling with his conscience.

By the time he got to Pont-Aven in 1888,

Gauguin had endured many such struggles.

He'd been a late arrival at art,

a successful stockbroker

who painted in his spare time.

His wife, the sparkling and international Mette,

was from Denmark.

And they'd had five, beautiful children,

whom he obviously doted over.

There are plenty of kids in art.

But not many are painted

as tenderly as Gauguin's.

Now, this family tenderness is puzzling.

The usual story about Gauguin

is that he abandoned his wife

and five children

and ran off to Tahiti looking for tropical fun.

But that turns out to be fake news.

I've been looking at his letters to his wife

and they tell a very different story.

What actually happened is that

when Gauguin decided to become an artist,

Mette moved back to Copenhagen.

She'd got used to a certain kind of lifestyle

and he was no longer providing it.

Gauguin followed her to Copenhagen.

He gave up art completely

and took a job as a tarpaulin salesman.

He was hopeless at it.

A complete failure.

So, Mette's family,

appalled by his Bohemian behaviour,

threw him out of Copenhagen.

They told him to go.

So, he went back to France a beaten man.

But, for decades afterwards,

decades,

he kept pleading with Mette to take him back...

..but it never happened.

It's all in the letters.

And it's the background to events in Pont-Aven

when Gauguin turned up there.

MEDIEVAL MUSIC

This is the Pension Gloanec where Gauguin stayed.

It was run by a woman called Marie-Jeanne Gloanec

and, on her birthday in 1888,

Gauguin gave her a beautiful still life.

Some flowers, some fruit,

and two lovey-dovey pears.

Weirdly, he signed the picture Madeleine,

not Gauguin, but Madeleine.

Because he was already in his 40s when he came to Pont-Aven,

Gauguin was older than the other artists

and they looked up to him as a father figure,

a teacher.

In particular, an 18-year-old boy-wonder

called Emile Bernard

was mightily impressed by Gauguin.

Bernard had studied in Paris.

with Toulouse-Lautrec and Van Gogh.

He was young, progressive,

but also very religious.

And he wanted to make a modern art

that was deep with religious meaning.

For Gauguin, all that was very interesting

but the most interesting thing about Bernard

was that he had a sister

who was very beautiful

and whose name was Madeleine.

Madeleine Bernard was 17,

vivacious, cute,

and even more religious than her brother.

As soon as she got to Brittany,

she bought herself a traditional Breton costume.

And that's how she'd go to Mass,

dressed as a local woman.

Gauguin, inevitably, fell in love with her.

He developed an enormous crush on Madeleine Bernard,

but he didn't do anything about it.

Not in real life anyway.

Madeleine, meanwhile, was also infatuated with Gauguin...

..and it all got very fraught.

Now, most of what we know about The Vision After The Sermon

is what Emile Bernard wrote down

many years later in a letter

he sent from Egypt.

Bernard tells us that Gauguin was heavily influenced

by Japanese prints.

The apple tree in the middle was borrowed from Hiroshige

and Jacob and the Angel

were originally a pair of sumo wrestlers.

He also tells us that Gauguin wanted to give the picture

to a church,

and that he, Gauguin and another painter called Charles Laval

carried it up here and tried to donate it.

But the priest turned it down.

His congregation, he said, wouldn't understand it.

But which church was it?

Gauguin tells us in a letter to Van Gogh that it was

the church at Pont-Aven,

but in Bernard's version

it was this one here in Nizon.

Gauguin must have known this church at Nizon

because one of his most religious Pont-Aven pictures,

The Green Christ,

was inspired by a statue in the cemetery.

Jesus on the cross with the three Marys.

According to Bernard,

the three of them carried Gauguin's picture

into the church and found a place for it above the door.

Laval, who was very tall,

lifted it up, says Bernard, and it fitted perfectly

with the primitive, wooden saints

who were already in here,

and the grotesque carvings on the beams.

The trouble is none of that actually fits.

The door is too high to put anything above it.

The primitive, wooden saints aren't very primitive,

and there are no grotesque carvings on the beams.

Now, since Gauguin's time,

the church has been extensively remodelled,

and that's usually given as the explanation

for all the differences,

but I think this...

..is the wrong church.

In between Pont-Aven and Nizon

is the beautiful woodland called the Bois d'Amour,

the Forest of Love.

Bernard actually painted Madeleine there,

lying on the ground,

like a medieval statue.

Now, this name, Madeleine,

is the French version of Magdalene

after Mary Magdalene,

the reformed prostitute in the Bible

who became one of Christ's most loyal followers.

So, it's a name loaded with big implications.

Madeleine is the archetypal sinner

who changed her ways.

That's why in Victor Hugo's great novel Les Miserables

the hero, Jean Valjean,

or Hugh Jackman, if you've seen the movie,

uses the pseudonym Monsieur Madeleine.

Like Mary Magdalene,

Monsieur Madeleine is a sinner who's chosen

the good path.

So what's this got to do with Gauguin?

Well, something very specific, actually.

Because, at exactly this time,

Gauguin painted a self-portrait

which he actually called Les Miserables.

And in which he assumes the identity of John Valjean,

Monsieur Madeleine.

The struggle between good and bad...

..the two sides of Madeleine...

..was on his mind.

Up here at the end of the Bois d'Amour

about a mile out of Pont-Aven,

there's this moody church,

the chapel at Tremalo.

There's something primitive about it, isn't there?

Something powerful and unusual.

And, if you think the outside is atmospheric,

wait till you see the inside.

You come in through this little, wooden door...

..and see how low the walls are

with all these perfect places...

..to hang the picture.

Look up here,

at the beams carved with medieval grotesques

and monsters.

And then...

..see all these primitive, wooden saints in here?

Just as Bernard describes.

The chapel at Tremalo

is actually in the parish of Nizon.

That's what it says on this old postcard of it.

And we know Gauguin came here

because one of his most marvellous Pont-Aven paintings

is the Yellow Christ...

..based on that sculpture up there.

So, Bernard's memory was wrong

and Gauguin's memory was right.

This, and not the church at Nizon, was where he wanted

to leave The Vision After The Sermon,

and how perfectly it would have fitted in here.

When you donate something to a church,

there's often a plaque or an inscription saying

where it came from.

That's why, on the frame of The Vision After The Sermon,

Gauguin wrote - "The Gift of Tristan Y Moscoso."

The little boy who grew up in the president's palace in Peru,

was showily donating a gift to the church.

Look what else they've got here at the top of the aisle.

On the right, that's Mary Magdalene,

or, as they call her here, Madeleine.

And, on the left,

that's St Leger,

the Christian martyr

who suffered and died for his beliefs.

Now, up on the left, in the main bit of the church,

is this sculpture here.

It's called The Education Of The Virgin,

with the young Virgin Mary being educated by her mother.

But it didn't always hang here.

In Gauguin's time,

it was right in the middle of the nave where the window is now.

Madeleine on the left,

St Leger on the right.

So, when Gauguin came to Mass here, with Madeleine,

and listened to the sermon,

his eyes would have wandered around the church

and he would have seen Madeleine and St Leger

flanking the Education Of The Virgin...

..just like the two figures flanking the wrestlers

in The Vision After The Sermon.

That's definitely Gauguin.

The hooked nose, the deep-set eyes.

It's what you see in all his self-portraits.

And he's given himself a monkish hairstyle, a tonsure,

just like St Leger

in the chapel at Tremalo.

And that's Madeleine in her Breton costume,

with her beautiful lips, deep in prayer,

and imagining the struggle between good and bad.

To sin or not to sin?

That is the question.

Just as Les Miserables is about

taking the right path or the wrong one,

so, too, is Gauguin's Pont-Aven masterpiece.

And this isn't his only portrayal of Madeleine.

He also painted her in a picture

which now hangs in Grenoble,

in which he emphasises her naughty eyes,

and her luscious lips,

and makes her out to be something of a temptress,

just like Mary Magdalene.

So, The Vision After The Sermon is a painting

about temptation and desire.

She's 17.

He's 40.

What's the right thing to do?

Even the apple tree isn't a coincidence.

In the Garden of Eden,

Eve tempted Adam with a fruit from The Tree Of Knowledge.

So, they did the wrong thing.

But, further along in the Bible,

Mary Magdalene did the right thing.

And so, too, did Jean Valjean in Les Miserables.

And so did Gauguin, in Pont-Aven in 1888.

With The Vision After The Sermon still wet on his easel,

he left Britany to join his painter buddy, Van Gogh,

in the south of France.

Gauguin never saw Madeleine again.

And neither of them ever had cause to regret

what they did or didn't do.

There are a million stories in the world of art.

This has been just one of them.