The Sower

The sun sits in the middle of the sky

A huge yellow disc rests on the horizon, almost exactly in the centre of the upper half of the canvas. Short strokes radiate from it across a yellow-green sky. Van Gogh painted the sun not as a soft glow but as a solid, thick shape with a clear edge.

The Kröller-Müller Museum, which owns the painting, describes the sun as the dominant element of the scene, a source of light and energy. Below it, a band of ripe wheat crosses the picture, and everything else falls under its influence.

Painted in Arles in June 1888

Van Gogh painted The Sower in Arles in the second half of June 1888, during the wheat harvest. He had arrived in the south in February and was working at great speed, painting fields and harvest scenes outdoors.

In letters to Theo and to the painter Émile Bernard he discussed the picture and its colour problems, and he included small sketches of the composition. He was not fully satisfied with it, and the subject stayed with him: in November 1888 he painted another, smaller sower with a large tree trunk cutting across the scene, now in the Van Gogh Museum.

A figure borrowed from Millet

The man striding to the right, scattering seed from a bag at his side, comes from Jean-François Millet. Millet’s Sower of 1850 was one of the most famous images of peasant labour in the nineteenth century, and Van Gogh copied and adapted it many times, from his early drawings in the Netherlands to his last year in Saint-Rémy.

Here the figure is small compared with the field and is painted in blue, with a straw hat and dark boots. Van Gogh took Millet’s gesture but placed it in his own landscape of strong colour. The sower is no longer a heroic giant filling the frame. He is one part of a larger cycle.

Sowing and harvest in the same view

Something in the scene does not match the farming calendar. In the foreground a man sows, which usually happens in autumn, while behind him the wheat is ripe and ready to cut, which happens in summer. At the left, a small farmhouse with a red roof stands against the yellow field.

The Kröller-Müller Museum reads the ripe corn behind the sower as a reference to the cycle of nature and life. Placing seed and harvest together turns an ordinary rural scene into an image of beginning and ending at once.

A field of violet against a yellow sky

The ploughed field is not brown. It is made of thousands of short strokes in violet, blue and orange, some running horizontally and some diagonally. A few dark birds pick at the seed on the left.

Van Gogh had studied the theory of complementary colours, and violet and yellow are an obvious pair. The cool, broken field and the warm, glowing sky intensify each other. The result is less a record of what the field looked like than a demonstration of how far colour could be pushed.

Questions about The Sower

Which version of The Sower is this?

The version painted in Arles in June 1888, with a large sun over ripe wheat. It is in the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo (KM 106.399).

Who inspired the sower figure?

Jean-François Millet, whose painting The Sower (1850) Van Gogh admired and copied many times.

Is there another Sower by Van Gogh?

Yes. He returned to the subject often. A smaller November 1888 version with a tree trunk is in the Van Gogh Museum, and he made later copies after Millet in Saint-Rémy.

Why is the field purple?

Van Gogh used violet as the complementary contrast to the yellow sky and wheat, to make both colours stronger.

Sources and image credit

• Kröller-Müller Museum: The Sower, KM 106.399
• Van Gogh Letters: letter 627, to Émile Bernard, June 1888
• Wikimedia Commons: The Sower

Faithful public-domain reproduction of The Sower (1888), via Wikimedia Commons. Detail images are crops of the same historical painting; no reconstruction or upscaling.