By the late 1960s Greaves painting had changed almost unrecognisably. Shedding the Kitchen Sink moniker, his new style drew upon early years working as a sign-writer's apprentice. Relinquishing gestural marks and textures of paint, he began instead to combine the bold outlines and expressive colours of Pop with the melancholia which had served his earlier domestic interiors.
The Sower owes a spiritual and thematic debt to Van Gogh's many paintings of sowers in fields, and in particular to an 1888 oil of the same title. The thick, impasted golden sun of Van Gogh's original is transmuted here to a refulgent sphere, brilliant orange offset by a background of purple, its chromatic opposite. The sower himself is reduced to a giant hand, a recurrent visual theme in Greaves' later paintings, scattering chrome yellow seeds across the breadth of the canvas.
With hard edge and flat colour, The Sower evidences Greaves at a critical stage in his career: abandoning that which had brought him approbation, dismantling his pictorial language, rebuilding the visual remnants into a body of newly expressive, symbolic work.