Vision after the Sermon was painted at Pont-Aven in Brittany in the summer of 1888. Gauguin wrote to his friend Van Gogh in September the same year that he had painted “a religious picture, badly executed but it interested me to do it and I like it”, and that “I think I have achieved a great rustic and superstitious simplicity in the figures. The whole is very severe”

The painting shows in the foreground several women dressed in traditional Breton costume who have just heard a sermon, perhaps delivered by the tonsured priest on the right. They see a vision depicted on the upper right corner: an episode from the Old Testament in which Jacob wrestles an angel. A tree trunk placed diagonally marks the boundary between the real women and their spiritual experience. The striking red ground is not painted according to perspective; a cow below the trunk suggests the rural setting

Gauguin collected Japanese ukiyoe prints by Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Hiroshige. His friend and fellow Post-Impressionist painter Émile Bernard pointed out that the struggling angel and Jacob could be inspired by the sumo wrestlers in Hokusai Manga

In addition, the diagonally placed tree and the use of red in the upper portion may be traced to the print Plum Park in Kameido by Hiroshige, which Van Gogh painted a copy of and where he colored the sky also in pink and red