Sower with Setting Sun after Millet

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Sower with Setting Sun after Millet: Vincent van Gogh

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Vincent van Gogh Oil Painting - Sower with Setting Sun after Millet

Keywords: Sower, Setting, Sun, Millet

Work Overview: The Sower (after Millet)
Vincent van Gogh
Date: 1889; France *
Style: Post-Impressionism
Genre: genre painting
Media: oil, canvas
Dimensions: 66 x 80.8 cm
Location: Private Collection

The "peasant genre" that greatly influenced Van Gogh began in the 1840s with the works of Jean-François Millet, Jules Breton, and others. In 1885 Van Gogh described the painting of peasants as the most essential contribution to modern art. He described the works of Millet and Breton of religious significance, "something on high."[33] A common denominator in his favored authors and artists was sentimental treatment of the destitute and downtrodden. He held laborers up to a high standard of how dedicatedly he should approach painting, "One must undertake with confidence, with a certain assurance that one is doing a reasonable thing, like the farmer who drives his plow... (one who) drags the harrow behind himself. If one hasn't a horse, one is one's own horse." Referring to painting of peasants Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo: "How shall I ever manage to paint what I love so much?"[34]

Van Gogh Museum says of Millet's influence on Van Gogh: "Millet's paintings, with their unprecedented depictions of peasants and their labors, mark a turning point in 19th-century art. Before Millet, peasant figures were just one of many elements in picturesque or nostalgic scenes. In Millet's work, individual men and women became heroic and real. Millet was the only major artist of the Barbizon School who was not interested in 'pure' landscape painting."[35]

Van Gogh made twenty-one paintings in Saint-Rémy that were "translations" of the work of Jean-François Millet. Van Gogh did not intend for his works to be literal copies of the originals. Speaking specifically of the works after Millet, he explained, "it's not copying pure and simple that one would be doing. It is rather translating into another language, the one of colors, the impressions of chiaroscuro and white and black."[36] He made a copy of The Gleaners (Des glaneuses) by Millet.

Theo wrote Van Gogh: "The copies after Millet are perhaps the best things you have done yet, and induce me to believe that on the day you turn to painting compositions of figures, we may look forward to great surprises."

Van Gogh's appreciation for Millet's work stemmed from the soulfulness he brought to the works, specifically honoring peasants' agricultural role. Plowing, sowing, and harvesting were seen by Van Gogh as symbols for man's command of nature and its eternal cycles of life.[47] Kay Larson of "New York Magazine" wrote of Millet's work: The Sower, who strides like an elemental force of nature across the cold, newly broken earth, is such an icon that Simon and Schuster uses it as a logo."

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