Paul Gauguin's Vision of the sermon (1888), one of the iconic works of the late nineteenth century, continues to provoke profound reassessment and interprefation by art historians, and it is central to this third volume of Van Gogh Studies: Dario Gamboni discusses the painting as a self-reflexive work dealing in visual terms with issues of perception, cognition and representation; Juliet Simpson addresses the art critic Aurier's contribution to the promotion of Gauguin as the exemplary symbolist artist; while Rodolphe Rapetri examines Emile Bernard's artistic response to Vision of the sermon in the context of Rosicrucianism; the Belgian art world's critical reaction to this and other works by the artist is meticulously described and analysed in Elise Eckermann's essay; while June Hargrove presents a challenging vision of Gauguin's portraits of his 'alter ego' Meijer de Haan.
Other contributions include Sandra Kisters's examination of the way the Thorvaldsen Museum in Copenhagen functioned as a role model for the Musée Rodin in Paris; Richard Thomson's discussion of the diverse ways in which French artists working in the early Third Republic responded to contemporary concepts of 'la psychologie nouvelle'; and, finally, a fresh view of nineteenth-century illustrations, including caricatures, offered by Patricia Mainardi.