Breton women in white caps watch Jacob wrestle the angel on a field of red. The scene is not realistic. It is belief made visible inside the mind after hearing scripture. Gauguin paints spiritual imagination, not event. The red ground makes faith feel intense, internal, and strange.

Oil on canvas with flat color fields, bold outlines, and simplified forms. Influenced by Japanese prints and cloisonné enamel.

The wrestling figures represent spiritual struggle. The red field separates vision from ordinary landscape.

Painted in Brittany, where Gauguin sought rural religious traditions he considered less corrupted by modern Paris.

It became a key work of Synthetism and Symbolism, influencing modern flat color and spiritual abstraction.