Der Sämann II

Late in 1888 Van Gogh was sharing the Yellow House in Arles with Paul Gauguin, who had just arrived and was pushing him to paint less from what stood in front of him and more from memory. That autumn Vincent returned to a subject he had loved since he first picked up a brush: the sower, borrowed from Jean-Francois Millet, the French painter of peasant labour he treated almost as a master. The man strides across a ploughed field with the low hills of Montmajour behind him and barely a strip of sky above. The figure carried a private weight for him. Before he painted, Van Gogh had wanted to be a preacher like his father, a sower of the word, and when that failed he began to speak of his own pictures as seeds cast into a field.