Ivan Grohar

A peasant scatters seed across a ploughed field in the cold light of a foggy morning. Behind him stands a wooden hayrack, and beyond that the hill of Kamnitnik near the small town of Škofja Loka. This is The Sower, painted in 1907, and most Slovenes carry a version of it in their pockets, on the national side of the 5-cent euro coin.

The man who painted it, Ivan Grohar, grew up an orphan in a poor village in the hills of Upper Carniola, then part of Austria-Hungary. He showed a gift for drawing early but had no way to pursue it until a local priest sent him to train with a church painter, and for years he made his living on religious pictures. He worked his way through realism into Impressionism, using a bright, broken touch that was new in Slovene painting, alongside a small group that included Rihard Jakopič and Matija Jama.

The Sower came to stand for a whole nation imagining its uncertain future, a people who sow so that they may one day harvest. Grohar did not live to enjoy the fame. He had hidden his tuberculosis for a long time, and died of it in a Ljubljana hospital in 1911, at 43.