“The Sower”
Oh, the brilliance! Today, we have another wonderful painting by Vincent van Gogh.
“The Sower”, sometimes referred to as “The Sower at Sunset”, is an oil on canvas painting by the Dutch artist, Vincent van Gogh. This was painted in June of 1888, after the Jean-Francois Millet painting from 1850 called “The Sower”. This was a theme which van Gogh revisited in his paintings and drawings over the years.
Millet was one of the founders of the Barbizon School of art. He was a huge inspiration for van Gogh throughout his aspiring art career. Millet’s earthy subject matters and darker, more muted color palette inspired most of van Gogh’s early work. Millet’s “The Sower” was highly revered by van Gogh, whose own father would use the biblical reference of the sower and reaper in his sermons.
In this painting, the sower is depicted in the same pose as in Millet’s version. In van Gogh’s, the sower is further back in the frame and surrounded by a brilliant landscape with a setting sun. Bright yellows, oranges, and golds radiate from the sun into the sky, while oranges, blues, and purples depict the earth. In the background, a horizon of fully grown corn stands tall. Several birds are silhouetted against the earth, barely visible amongst the contrasting shadows.
While experimenting in different painting techniques, van Gogh repeatedly used Millet’s sower as his subject. He was fond of peasants and the working class in general and wanted to show that their physical labor was closer to God.
During this period in the art world, the impressionists had radically changed the art scene. The newer, more modern way of painting spurred many other artists to attempt to modernize art in their own way. The impressionists paved the way for the neo-impressionists, pointillists, and cloisonnism, which all often fell under the umbrella terms of post-impressionism. The bright contrast of the yellow sky with the purple fields reflects van Gogh’s experiments with the use of complementary contrasts and bright colors in his own attempt to modernize the art subject.
“The Sower” is currently on display at the Kröller-Müller Museum, in Otterlo, in the Netherlands. This museum has an extensive collection of van Gogh’s work, second only to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands.
For more on Vincent van Gogh, please visit his short biography here.
You can find more artists to learn about here.
