The close association of peasants and the cycles of nature particularly interested Van Gogh, such as the sowing of seeds, harvest and sheaves of wheat in the fields. Van Gogh saw plowing, sowing and harvesting symbolic to man's efforts to overwhelm the cycles of nature: "the sower and the wheat sheaf stood for eternity, and the reaper and his scythe for irrevocable death." The dark hours conducive to germination and regeneration are depicted in The Sower and wheat fields at sunset.
Van Gogh made a number of variations on a theme depicting a sower in front of a setting sun. Especially striking in this version are the bright, unnatural colours and the unusual composition, in which the knotty tree in the foreground constitutes a diagonal division of the canvas. His inspiration for this may have come from a Japanese print.