El sembrador (Sembrador al atardecer)

Van Gogh painted this in Arles in June 1888, chasing an idea he had carried for years. He revered the older French painter Jean-Francois Millet, who had made peasant labour his great subject, and he wanted to redo Millet's sower his own way, in strong modern colour instead of Millet's greys and browns. So he put an enormous lemon-yellow sun low on the horizon, a green-yellow sky, and a violet field, and set the dark figure striding across it flinging seed. Behind the sower, ripe corn still stands, so the sowing and the harvest sit in one picture, the whole turn of the year at once. He described the colours to his brother Theo almost pigment by pigment in a letter, proud of how far he had pushed them.