Jean-François Millet was the artist that van Gogh most revered. Although he never saw Millet's famous Sower - already in a Boston collection before he was born - van Gogh admired Millet's other treatments of the theme, and sought to emulate them. At the very beginning of his career, he wrote that "I must draw diggers, sowers, men & women at the plough, without cease. . . I no longer stand as helpless before nature as I used to do."