Le Semeur III (version 1)

By 1888 cheap Japanese woodblock prints had been arriving in Paris for years, and Van Gogh had caught the fever badly. He owned hundreds of them, and when he moved south to Arles he decided the strong light there made it his own Japan. You can see the prints in this sower. A bare tree slices straight across the picture on a hard diagonal, the kind of daring cropping he found in the Japanese sheets. Behind the peasant the sun hangs as a flat yellow disc, so large it reads almost like a halo. He built the whole scene on two colours chosen on purpose, a greenish-yellow sky set against a violet field. The striding figure itself he borrowed, as he often did, from a print after the French painter Millet. It was the second time in one autumn he painted this man scattering seed.