Sower

This sheet is about as early as Van Gogh gets. He made it in 1881 in Etten, the Dutch village where his parents lived, just after he had decided to become an artist and was still teaching himself the basics by copying others. The figure comes straight from Jean-Francois Millet, the French painter of peasant life whom Van Gogh revered. He worked from a black-and-white print of Millet's sower and built the image up in pencil, pen and ink, with touches of watercolour. The subject stayed with him for the rest of his life. He saw the man scattering seed as the whole cycle of growth and harvest caught in a single stride, and he came back to the sower again and again over the next nine years, right up to the blazing coloured versions he painted in the south. Here it is still all line and earth, the work of someone learning how to draw.