Der Sämann III (Version 2)

The sower was the first great figure van Gogh ever tried to draw, back when he was teaching himself from prints after the French painter Millet, whose 1850 Sower he treated almost as scripture. In Arles in 1888, working in the southern light he had chased down from Paris, he returned to it. He did not want Millet's grey, labouring man. He wanted the same age-old subject in full colour, a field worked in thick strokes of violet and orange and a huge low sun sitting behind the sower's head like a halo. He knew it did not fully come off, and he painted the motif more than once, worrying at it in letters to Theo through that year.