"At the heart of this book - an art story even more than a personal story - are two contending ways of using paint and canvas for spiritual ends, of putting God in pigment. Silverman uncovers the ethos of the sanctity of labor in the van Gogh family's Dutch Reformed Church, and discovers van Gogh as a weaver-painter and builder of craft tools, seeking to express divinity in the labor forms of paint as woven cloth, plowed earth, and crumbled brick.

Gauguin, on the other hand, was educated in a little-known Catholic institution that emphasized release from a corrupt earth and corrupt bodies; Silverman presents him as a penitent sensualist, who turns to painting as a new site to pose the fundamental question of the Catholic catechism - "Why are we here on earth?" - and who oscillates between visionary ascent and carnal temptation.".

"Debora Silverman's book enables the reader to see van Gogh's and Gauguin's art - from the familiar masterpieces of Arles, Nuenen, and Tahiti to lesser-known drawings and objects - in constantly new and surprising ways and to appreciate the special character of their nineteenth-century cultures and contexts. This book, the first of its kind, opens up an unmined terrain of central importance: the relationship between religion and modernism."--BOOK JACKET.