The Sower III (version 1)

The Bührle Collection's Sower III is one of multiple treatments of this endlessly significant subject that Van Gogh made at Arles in 1888, each version exploring a slightly different relationship between the dark human figure, the blazing sun, and the plowed earth of the field. Emil Bührle's Swiss collection, assembled in the mid-twentieth century and now partly housed at the Kunsthaus Zürich, includes several major Post-Impressionist works that testify to the Swiss art market's early engagement with French modernism. Van Gogh's sower subjects of 1888 push beyond the earlier Nuenen treatments in chromatic intensity: where the Dutch versions were dark and earthy, these Arles versions are almost visionary — the enormous sun filling half the composition with radiating yellows and oranges, the sower's dark silhouette reduced to a symbolic gesture against that light. He wrote to Bernard that he was trying to express 'something like what the halo used to symbolize,' the luminous energy of a figure at work in nature rendered through color rather than conventional religious symbol. The Sower was, for Van Gogh, his most personal subject — more autobiographical than any self-portrait, more revealing of his fundamental beliefs about art, labor, and the relationship between human effort and natural process.

The sower's dark silhouette moves across the luminous landscape, the enormous sun on the horizon radiating outward in swirling strokes. Van Gogh's complementary palette — yellow sun and field against blue-violet sky and earth — creates maximum chromatic vibration. The figure is simplified to essential gesture, the sun and its radiation the painting's true subject.