Van Gogh started his professional career in the 1870s, when he gained experience in the art market as an apprentice in the London and Paris art trade. Subsequently, he trained to become a priest; however, this venture proved unsuccessful. It was not until 1880 that he decided to pursue an art career. He studied briefly in Brussels and Antwerp, but it was outside the academy that he developed his extraordinary talent for drawing as a self-taught artist. When van Gogh moved to Etten, the Netherlands, in 1881 to live with his father, he produced drawings inspired by Old Master paintings and depictions of nature. Instead of the big city of Paris and its bohemian lifestyle, van Gogh devoted his early 1880s paintings to life in the countryside and the peasant and working-class milieu.

He found inspiration in the works of Jean-François Millet and the Barbizon School. In April 1881, van Gogh produced a complex drawing based on Millet's painting of a sower (1850, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).
Van Gogh would continue to explore the motif of the sower in around 30 drawings and paintings until his untimely death. Our small, detailed ink drawing marks the beginning of his deep interest in portraying farmers sowing seeds and in depicting peasants in general. Our work is registered in the catalogues raisonnés as one of Van Gogh's earliest independent drawings. Paintings with related motifs, such as “De zaaier” (The Sower) from 1888 (Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo), and a wealth of drawings testify to the importance of this subject throughout his artistic career, which came to a tragic, abrupt end in 1890. In the last months before his death, he made several more works with this motif, including “Veld met zaaier” (reverse side, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam).

"With a little sepia and India ink, and now and then with a little colour."
Vincent van Gogh an Theo van Gogh, Etten, September 1881, letter no. 150.

This drawing is part of a small group of works from 1881 featuring a variety of drawings of farmers sowing seeds. In September, van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo: "I have begun to work from a live model again. Fortunately, I have been able to persuade several persons here to sit for me. [...] I have drawn a man with a spade, [...], a sower twice, a girl with a broom twice. [...] Now I must draw diggers, sowers, men and women at the plough, ceaslessly. Scrutinize and draw everything that is a part of country life. [...] I have also started to introduce the brush and the stump. With a little sepia and India ink, and now and then with a little colour." (Etten, September 1881, letter no. 150).
Van Gogh places the sower prominently at the center of the composition: standing upright, he appears to be resting in the middle of a flat landscape, while the small triangles in the background suggest haystacks. With confident, in part quite powerful brushstrokes and an impressive clarity, van Gogh demonstrates his enormous talent. The forthcoming color frenzy of his paintings and the tremendous creative energies are foreshadowed—almost with a wink—in the small area of the upper body washed in a delicate light blue, cautiously but confidently alluding to what lies ahead.

Although this small yet highly detailed drawing stands at the beginning of his outstanding artistic career, it already points to some of the stylistic characteristics of his soon-to-follow achievements as a key figure of European Modernism: the dynamic lines in the background, the high horizon line, the isolated, bare trees, and the rounded, striking features of figures that almost fill the entire surface, as in “The Potato Eaters” (1885, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam) or his colorful “Sower” from 1888 (Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo)—works he made soon after the present drawing.

The delicate drawing eventually found its way into the collection of the renowned Van Gogh expert and collector H. P. Bremmer, who from 1907 onwards worked first as a teacher and later as an advisor to Helene Kröller-Müller (1869–1939), whose collection forms the core of the now world-famous museum of the same name in Otterlo. "His importance for the collection and the museum can hardly be overestimated. After all, it is thanks to him, as Helene Kröller-Müller’s advisor and her 'council in all aesthetic matters', that she assembled such an impressive and sophisticated collection" (quoted from: https://krollermuller.nl/en/timeline/the-legacy-of-h-p-bremmer). [CH]