Despite what it may look like, The Yellow Christ by Gauguin has nothing to do with Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ.

Gauguin made his Yellow Christ right before he bounced from France to the South Pacific in a protest of the Western world. He was over Paris and Parisians and the Salon and abandoned it all to go to Tahiti, but not before he made a pit stop in Pont-Aven in Brittany, France. This is where that unmistakable Gauguin style came to be – the palette of yellows, greens, reds and oranges, with hard lines. Eventually he had enough of the place and it’s lack of women who would pose nude for him, but for a while he was completely content in Brittany.

This depiction of a crucified Christ was inspired by a seventeenth century wooden crucifix in the Trémalo Chapel very near Pont-Aven. The women in peasant garb who surround him were, you guessed it, the peasants. The piety of these people was extreme. They prayed three times a day in a Catholic ritualistic prayer called Angelus, which seems like a lot but if you were raised Catholic, you get that being wildly bored is part of how you repent for your sins. But anyways, the worshippers who were immortalized in this painting believed that their farming had a Christ-like life cycle of birth, life, death, and rebirth and that praying was necessary for the success of their crops. They also made extra sure that the praying succeeded by working really, really hard.

This painting is the beginning of the end of Gauguin as an Impressionist. He got a taste of the simplicity and isolation that he so craved in Pont-Aven and never looked back. Soon he would leave for the South Pacific, where this style would only be strengthened. Unfortunately this was to the detriment of the young girls on the island who were subjected to Gauguin’s lecherous ways.