#farming

From what I can find he was still teaching himself to draw when he made this — no training, just prints of an older painter's peasant scenes copied over and over until the figures came right. He kept going back to this same striding sower for years afterwards.

He painted this same striding figure more than once; the version that went to the Paris Salon and got people arguing about whether farm labourers belonged in serious painting is a different one, elsewhere. Van Gogh, apparently, copied the sower over and over for years — he treated it as something to learn from rather than something to hang.