Vincent Van Gogh

Émile Bernard, Brittany (acquired directly from the artist in July 1888)

Ambroise Vollard, Paris (probably acquired from the above between 1899-1904)

Théodore Duret, Paris

Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 1 March 1928, lot 41 (consigned by the estate of the above)

Émile Bernheim, Paris and Galerie Thannhauser, Berlin (jointly acquired at the above sale)

Galerie Thannhauser, Berlin (acquired in whole from Bernheim on 3 March 1928)

Galerie Caspari, Munich (acquired from the above on 26 June 1929)

Paul Reinhardt Galleries, New York (acquired from the above probably in August 1929)

John Nicholas Brown II, Rhode Island (acquired by descent from the above)

J. Carter Brown, Washington, D.C. (acquired by descent from the above)

Estée and Joseph Lauder, New York (acquired from the above in 1979)

Thence by descent to the present owner

Providence, The Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, 1931

Omaha, Nebraska, Joslyn Memorial Art Gallery, 1941 

New York, Acquavella Galleries, XIX & XX Century Master Paintings, 1979, no. 4

New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Van Gogh in Arles, 1984, no. 68, p. 134, illustrated in color (titled The Sower)

Paris, Musée d'Orsay, Millet, Van Gogh, 1998-99, no. 45, p. 99, illustrated in color; p. 165 (titled Semeur)

“Extraits de lettres de Vincent van Gogh à E. Bernard,” Mercure de France, vol. VIII, May 1893, p. 15, illustrated (titled Sämann)

Vincent van Gogh. Briefe, Berlin, 1906, p. 53, illustrated

Julius Meier-Graefe, Vincent van Gogh, Munich, 1910, p. 60, illustrated

Ambroise Vollard, ed., Lettres de Vincent van Gogh à Émile Bernard, Paris, 1911, pl. LXXVII, n.p., illustrated (titled Le Semeur)

Théodore Duret, Vincent Van Gogh, Paris, 1916, pp. 65 and 107; pl. XIII, illustrated (titled Le Semeur)

Curt Glaser, Vincent van Gogh, Leipzig, 1921, pl. 17, illustrated

Théodore Duret, Vincent Van Gogh, Edition définitive, Paris, 1924, pp. 96-97, pl. XIII, illustrated (titled Semeur)

Jacob-Baart de la Faille, L'oeuvre de Vincent van Gogh, Catalogue raisonné, Paris and Brussels, 1928, vol. III, no. 1442, p. 135; vol. IV, pl. CLV

Douglas Lord, ed., Vincent Van Gogh Letters to Émile Bernard, New York, 1938, p. 58

Hans Graber, ed., Vincent van Gogh: Briefe an Émile Bernard Paul Gauguin, John Russell Paul Signac und Andere, Basel, 1941, pl. 36, illustrated (titled Sämann)

Jacob-Baart de la Faille, The Works of Vincent van Gogh, His Paintings and Drawings, London, 1970, no. F1442, p. 506, illustrated; p. 663 (dated June 1888)

Paolo Lecaldano, L’opera pittorica completa di Van Gogh e i suoi nessi grafica, Milan, 1971, no. 520b, p. 208; p. 209, illustrated (titled Disegno: cannuccia appuntita and dated June 1888)

Jan Hulsker, “The Intriguing Drawings of Vincent van Gogh,” Vincent. Bulletin of the Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh, vol. 3, no. 4, 1974, p. 26 (titled The Sower in a Wheatfield)

Charles W. Millard, “A Chronology for Van Gogh's Drawings of 1888,” Master Drawings, vol. 12, no. 2, summer 1974, p. 160 (titled The Sower)

Jan Hulsker, The Complete Van Gogh, Paintings, Drawings, Sketches, Amsterdam, 1977, no. 1508, p. 340; p. 343, illustrated (titled Sower with Setting Sun)

Jan Hulsker, The Complete Van Gogh: Paintings, Drawings, Sketches, New York, 1980, no. 1508, p. 343, illustrated (titled Sower with Setting Sun)

Exh. Cat., Tokyo, The National Museum of Western Art and Nagoya City Museum, Vincent van Gogh, 1985, p. 200, illustrated (titled The Sower)

Exh. Cat., Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum, Van Gogh & Millet, 1988-89, p. 177, illustrated (titled Sower with Setting Sun)

Jacob-Baart de la Faille, Vincent van Gogh: The Complete Works on Paper, Catalogue Raisonné, San Francisco, 1992, vol. I, no. 1442, p. 375; vol. II, pl. CLV, illustrated

Liesbeth Heenk, Vincent van Gogh's Drawings. An Analysis of their Production and Uses, Dissertation, Courtauld Institute of Art, 1996, pp. 170-171 

Jan Hulsker, The New Complete Van Gogh: Paintings, Drawings, Sketches, 1996, no. 1508, p. 336; p. 343, illustrated (titled Sower with Setting Sun and dated circa 17 July 1888)

Exh. Cat., Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum and New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Van Gogh Draughtsman: The Masterpieces, 2005, p. 133, illustrated in color; p. 189 (titled Sower with Setting Sun)

Exh. Cat., New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Art Institute of Chicago and Paris, Musée d’Orsay, Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde, 2006-07, pp. 57-59

Marije Vellekoop, Roelie Zwikker and Monique Hageman, Vincent van Gogh, Drawings, vol. 4, Amsterdam, 2007, p. 148, illustrated in color; p. 150 (titled The Sower)

Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten and Nienke Bakker, eds., Vincent van Gogh, The Letters, The Complete Illustrated and Annotated Edition, Volume 4: Arles, 1888-1889, London, 2009, letter 643, p. 179, illustrated in color (titled Sower with Setting Sun)

Stefan Koldehoff and Chris Stolwijk, eds., The Thannhauser Gallery: Marketing Van Gogh, Brussels, 2017, no. 60, p. 216; p. 217, illustrated in color (titled The Sower)

Le Semeur dans un champ de blé au soleil couchant

Judy Sund

Executed in July 1888 at Arles, in the south of France, this drawing is one in a suite of fifteen that Vincent van Gogh sent to his friend and colleague, Émile Bernard, who was working in Brittany that summer. Through an exchange of letters and drawings, van Gogh and Bernard kept abreast of one another’s ambitions and accomplishments in a period of great innovation and productivity for both.

Like others in the suite sent in mid-July, this drawing replicates a recently completed painting—in this case one that van Gogh had “wanted to do for such a long time:” a scene of farm labor in a plowed field, set against “a sky almost as bright as the sun itself” (Letter no. 628) (see figs. 1, 2 and 9). In his pen-and ink rendering of his long-dreamt-of painting, a radiant, low-hung sun backlights a light-footed farmer who moves across the furrows of a field alive with pen strokes of varied size, orientation and density. Traversing it on a diagonal, this solitary figure is intent on the task of casting seeds drawn from the pouch strapped to his chest.

The scene’s Provençal setting was still something of a novelty to van Gogh—who had moved to Arles just months before—but the sower was not. A similar seed-thrower was the subject of the artist’s first known drawing (see fig. 6), and the figure went on to became a prominent leitmotif in van Gogh's work (see figs. 7 and 8), engaging him into the last year of his life. This archetypal agrarian laborer not only was redolent of van Gogh’s rural roots, but an emblem of his Christian faith, and an enduring homage to an admired forebear, Jean-François Millet.

Born and raised in a farming district in the southern Netherlands, van Gogh had an enduring attachment to rustic subjects, most especially to the age-old tasks known as the Labors of the Field. Manual and seasonal, the Labors are referenced in the Bible and remained virtually unchanged until the 19th century. As van Gogh’s world increasingly modernized, the reapers, gleaners and sowers he depicted bespoke comforting continuity and tradition. They also carried Christian connotations with which he’d been familiar since childhood, thanks to biblical parables in which Jesus couched Christian messaging in agrarian metaphors to which common folk could relate. One of the best known is the Parable of the Sower, recorded in the Gospels of Matthew (13:1-23), Mark (4:1-9) and Luke (8:4-15). In that parable, Christ casts himself and those who disseminate his teachings as sowers; the seeds they scatter symbolize the word of God. While some of their seeds land in good soil, take root, and yield a harvest of righteous believers, others fall on hard ground where they wither away or are snatched up by birds who represent “the evil one.”

Van Gogh’s father, Theodorus, was a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, whose bible took pride of place in their home (see fig. 4). Vincent, who was reared on the Good Book and favored its Parables above all the rest, once described his father as “a Christian laborer . . . and sower of the word” (Letter no. 109). For a time in his mid-twenties, Vincent—having washed out as an apprentice art dealer—aimed to follow his father’s career path. But, impatient with the conventional route to ordination, he abandoned his preparatory studies in favor of an unorthodox, hands-on ministry in a Belgian mining community. Though his commitment to his flock there was duly noted, van Gogh’s eccentric evangelism discomfited church authorities, who dismissed him from his post.

Disillusioned but ever devout, van Gogh reported—in a letter to his brother Theo—that he had pulled himself together by “pick[ing] up my pencil” (Letter no. 158). His pad of paper became the pulpit denied him, and an abiding spirituality would continue to infuse his work. Van Gogh’s model in this regard was the recently deceased painter Jean-François Millet, whose work he’d first encountered while working in the art trade. Three of van Gogh’s paternal uncles were art dealers, and young Vincent, who entered the business at age 16, spent six years with Goupil & Cie., an international firm with branches in The Hague, London and Paris. At the time, graphic reproductions accounted for much of Goupil’s business, and over the course of his tenure there van Gogh built his own collection of prints, one in which Millet’s work was well-represented.

A leading light of the French Realist school, Millet won notoriety with a series of paintings that portrayed agrarian labor as grimy and arduous, yet noble. The most well-known among them was The Sower shown at the Salon of 1850-51 (see fig. 5), whose monumental, blunt-featured protagonist seemed, in the assessment of critic Théophile Gautier, to be “painted with the very soil he is planting” (La Presse, 15 March 1851). In the wake of the “people’s revolutions” that rocked Europe in 1848-49, many viewers were disturbed by Millet’s lionization of an anonymous and shabby laborer whose demeanor struck them as threatening and even militant.

By the time van Gogh encountered Millet’s work, some two decades later, the arts establishment had embraced the once-edgy artist (Millet was inducted into the Légion d’Honneur in 1868 and elected to the Salon jury in 1870). After his death in 1875, some eulogized Millet as quasi-saintly—a characterization van Gogh embraced. He was struck by the “evangelical tone” of Millet’s work, which, though firmly grounded in reality, gave glimpses of “the human soul,” evoked “something on high,” and seemed to him “pure, holy, and wonderfully beautiful” (Letter no. 211).

As van Gogh embarked on a third career, determined to make an artist of himself, he focused on drawing, which he considered foundational—“the backbone of painting, the skeleton that supports all the rest” (Letter no. 255). In addition to working his way through a drawing manual published by Goupil (Charles Bargue’s popular Cours du dessin, 1866-76), van Gogh made drawings after Millet, who became a virtual mentor. Relying on prints sent by Theo, Vincent copied Millet’s Labors of the Fields (1852) and Four Hours of the Day (1858), as well as his parable-inspired Sower. In September 1880, Vincent reported that he had recently made five drawings after The Sower “and yet I’ll go back to it again and again, that figure haunts me so” (Letter no. 157).

Indeed, once returned to the Netherlands in the early 1880s, van Gogh drew several sowers from life, often posing them in the manner of Millet’s famed figure. Though his preoccupation with the motif waned during his two-year sojourn in Paris (1886-88), it returned in full force once van Gogh moved to Arles, where, not far from the modern town with its gasworks and railyard, farmers engaged in traditional agrarian tasks. Trekking deeper into the countryside, van Gogh encountered people and places he described as “pure Millet,” and as he told his friend Bernard, the rusticity of Provence provoked “snatches of memories from times past” and “yearnings for that infinite of which the Sower and the sheaf are symbols” (Letter no. 628). Both fond reminiscence and spiritual longing fueled van Gogh’s determination to revisit Millet’s Sower—this time in oil, in color, and in an expansive landscape.

In the years since he first copied The Sower, van Gogh had become a painter. But while his Dutch paintings of farm workers recalled Millet’s in their murky palettes and rough-hewn surfaces (see fig. 3), van Gogh had yet to make a painting directly modeled on one by Millet. When he set out to do so in Arles, transferring Millet’s Sower to a Provençal landscape, he did not aim to recreate the original, but instead to transform it, deploying a vibrant palette that not only captured the strong sunlight and rich colors of southern climes, but, more significantly, enhanced the expressiveness of an already evocative motif. Van Gogh’s specific inspiration was Eugène Delacroix’s Christ on the Sea of Galilee (1853), a painting in which a well-known subject was to his mind rendered sublime through the “symbolic language” of color (see fig. 10).

Van Gogh disliked most religious painting and felt that few artists had succeeded in capturing the essence of Christ and his message. Millet and Delacroix were notable exceptions, although—as Vincent told Theo—The Sower and Christ on the Sea of Galilee were “absolutely different.” Recognizing the merits of each, van Gogh aimed to consolidate their strengths in a single painting that eschewed the overt religiosity of Delacroix’s subject in favor of allusive metaphor, and heightened the latent sanctity of Millet’s motif by way of contrasting colors that “make each other shine.” In a letter to Bernard, van Gogh described his own work’s “chrome yellow sky, almost as bright as the sun itself,” and its “downright violet” foreground, and asserted that he could “hardly give a damn about the veracity of the color,” which he’d manipulated to excite the eye and convey and elicit emotion.

Written in mid-June, van Gogh’s letter included a sketch of the work in progress—a painting he subsequently “reworked completely” before sending Bernard a finished drawing in mid-July (Letter no. 628). Rendered in ink on wove paper, the present drawing is one of fifteen drawings of roughly the same size (about 10 by 14 inches), some horizontal in orientation, some vertical. The suite presented varied aspects of Provence: urban scenes made in the heart of Arles, glimpses of the Mediterranean coast, the portrait of a Zouave soldier van Gogh met in a local brothel, and several drawings of farms and fields (see figs. 11-14). Van Gogh gifted them to Bernard in hopes, he wrote, of receiving “sketches after your Breton studies” in return (Letter no. 641).

Each of van Gogh’s drawings was based on a painting, but none is a literal copy of the work that preceded it; instead, they are loose translations that van Gogh termed “repetitions.” He added vibrant color to just one of them; the rest, including The Sower, were underdrawn in pencil then worked up in brown ink applied with both quill and reed pens. In The Sower, the fine lines delineating the sun and its rays were drawn with a quill, while the broader marks in the lower registers were made with pens van Gogh crafted himself from the hollow stems of reeds that grew along Arles’s network of canals.

Eager to “do drawings in the style of Japanese prints” (Letter no. 594) that he avidly collected (see fig. 15), van Gogh had begun experimenting with reed pens in the spring of 1888. Although Japanese artists used brushes rather than pens to create the graphic effects he admired, van Gogh found the marks produced by his handmade pens similarly bold. Moreover, reed pens, being brittle, demanded a light touch, and their rapid ink flow encouraged quick work of the sort van Gogh ascribed to the Japanese, who drew, he wrote, “like a flash of lightning” (Letter no. 620). His inability to completely control his reed pens’ output encouraged a certain spontaneity and prompted van Gogh’s incorporation of interesting imperfections (like the splotches that spilled from an overfull pen and the split lines produced as it emptied).

In contrast to the much-reworked painting it reprised (which van Gogh came to consider “a failure”), his sprightly pen-and-ink rendering of The Sower looks fairly freewheeling. By the time he made it, van Gogh had gained fluency with the reed pen by doing “an ENORMOUS amount of drawing” at Arles, and had devised his own rich vocabulary of calligraphic marks (Letter no. 594). The multidirectional pen slashes in the foreground of The Sower—some very dark, others pale—describe turned earth, while a hail of small dots suggests the seeds the sower throws. In the drawing’s midground, van Gogh created a perspectival effect by using smaller and finer marks, beyond which a series of parallel vertical striations, crowned by dense stippling, represent a field of rustling wheat that perhaps portends the ultimate fruitfulness of the sower’s endeavor.

Van Gogh folded his signature into the furrows at The Sower’s lower right. He did not always sign his work (just a few of the drawings sent to Bernard bear his name); when he did, it was as “Vincent”—a mark of humility, perhaps, but also a concession to non-Dutch speakers who struggled to pronounce “van Gogh.” Here, though small and inconspicuous, the artist’s signature signals his seriousness of purpose and his pride in the work produced.

Bernard bound the suite van Gogh sent in July into an album, which he showed to their mutual friend Paul Gauguin later that summer. Years later, after van Gogh had died and his reputation was on the rise, Bernard broke up the set and began selling individual drawings, which are now widely dispersed. The Sower went first to Ambroise Vollard, a renowned dealer who was also a collector and publisher (Vollard’s Lettres de Vincent van Gogh à Émile Bernard appeared in 1911). Vollard in turn sold the drawing to the collector and critic Théodore Duret, a longtime champion of cutting-edge French art, who is well known for his Critique d’avant-garde (1885), and in 1916 published a monograph on van Gogh. After Duret’s death in 1928, The Sower entered a U.S. collection; it was acquired by Estée Lauder a half-century later.

Judy Sund is Professor Emerita of Modern European Art and Art of the Americas, City University of New York