Il seminatore (studio)

In 1883 Vincent van Gogh had been painting for barely two years, working in the grey light of the Netherlands and still copying the man he called his teacher, Jean-Francois Millet. Millet's sower, a peasant flinging seed across a field, was the figure he came back to more than any other. He drew and painted it dozens of times over his short life, treating each version as what he called a translation of Millet into his own hand. This early study keeps to the sober earth tones of his Dutch years, long before the blazing yellow sun and blue sower he would paint in the south of France. For van Gogh the labourer scattering seed by hand was a near-religious subject; he believed the peasant at his work lived closer to God than most.