Der Sämann

Ivan Grohar painted The Sower in 1907, when Slovenes lived under Austria-Hungary and had no country of their own. A peasant strides across a ploughed field in the pale light of an early, misty morning, scattering seed with a wide swing of his arm. Slovene writers quickly read the figure as the nation itself, a small people sowing in the hope of some harvest to come, and the image stuck. Grohar worked in Skofja Loka and was one of the founders of Slovene Impressionism, dabbing the field in flecks of broken color. He was poor and ill and died of tuberculosis in 1911, four years after finishing it. In 2007, when Slovenia adopted the euro, the sower was put on the national side of the 5-cent coin.