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Sower with Setting Sun, 1888
Oil on canvas, 73 x 92 cm
Signed lower right: Vincent
De la Faille 450
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Japanese influences on the painting of the second half of the 19th century were very important for van Gogh’s development. For him, this wasn't just an aesthetic influence, as for Manet, Whistler and Degas, but Japan symbolizes a remote perfect world where artists live together in genuine community. Like his contemporaries, van Gogh knew only the Japanese coloured woodcut. His acquaintance with it began in December 1885 in Antwerp, where he studied at the Academy, and where he surrounds his table with Japanese woodcuts, as he reports to his brother. He could indulge more intensively in the field of Japanese woodcuts in 1886/87 in Paris; he buys them for Theo, he even exhibits some prints in the Café Tambourin, which was not without influence on younger artists like Louis Anquetin and Emile Bernard. In the hectic atmosphere of Paris, however, he cannot realize the ideal situation that seems to be reflected in this art. The inaccessible Orient is replaced by Provence, where he seeks to found a Southern school. In a letter to his sister in September 1888 he writes, "I do not need Japanese things any more, since here I am in Japan".
"The Sower", done in October 1888 in Arles, might have been painted in such a mood. West and East are fused. The sower looms on the left, his action, repeated from time immermorial, is hallowed by the huge ball of the setting sun; a tree beside him divides the picture diagonally and accents the fields lying in violet twilight. The symbolic tree is an old Japanese motif; van Gogh had copied Hiroshige’s plum trees, in Paris, from "100 views of famous places in Edo".
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