The Sower
Oil on jute, mounted on canvas. 73.5 x 93 cm.
Vincent, Painted in 1888 in Arles, De la Faille 450.

Japanese influence on the painting of the second half of the 19th century is also important in van Gogh?s development. It was not for him just an aesthetic influence, as with Manet, Whistler and Degas, but Japan symbolizes a remote perfect world where artists live together in genuine community. Like his contemporaries, he knows 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 can indulge more intensively in the Japanese woodcut in 1886/87 in Paris; he buys them for Theo, he even exhibits Japanese woodcuts in the Café Tambourin, and this 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 here fused. The sower looms on the left, his immemorial activity hallowed by the huge ball of the rising sun; a tree beside him divides the picture diagonally and accents the fields still 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".This is also the dominant theme of the painting "The Vision after the Sermon" which was painted at the same time by Gauguin at Pont-Aven, but of which van Gogh could hardly have known about.