The Seed Received among the Thorns, from the Parable of the Sower (c. 1573): Art, History and Details

The Seed Received among the Thorns, from the Parable of the Sower (c. 1573) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Gerard P. van Groningen (Netherlandish, active late 1500s).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This design for a print is from a suite portraying the biblical parable of the sower. The parable compares types of soil to people in the world: one hardened; one fickle; one distracted by things of the world; and one with an open heart, ready to accept God. The third sower (here, a pilgrim) distractedly throws his seeds among thorns. He is surrounded by two female personifications—Cares of the World, and Avarice (extreme greed for money). Behind them, the fourth sower successfully plants his crop. The content and its presentation exemplify the instructive tone of the period’s moral discourse.

Object facts

• Title: The Seed Received among the Thorns, from the Parable of the Sower
• Date: c. 1573
• Creator attribution: Gerard P. van Groningen (Netherlandish, active late 1500s)
• Culture: Belgium, Flanders, Antwerp, 16th century
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: Black chalk, gray wash, and brown ink, on cream laid paper; traces of transfer
• Dimensions: Sheet: 19.7 x 25.5 cm (7 3/4 x 10 1/16 in.)
• Collection: DR - Flemish
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 2012.4

A detail from the museum

The stage-like format of this drawing recalls enacted "plays of meaning," or moralizing plays, performed in the Netherlands at the time.

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Christopher Bishop Fine Art. Master Drawings Catalog 2014. Milford, CT: Christopher Bishop Fine Art, 2014. p. 61.
• Hautekeete, Stefaan, ed. From Floris to Rubens: Master Drawings from a Belgian Private Collection. Ghent: Snoeck, 2016. p. 79 (entry by Stijn Alsteens).
• Alsteens, Stijn. Review of Corpus of Drawings in Midwestern Collections, [II B]: Sixteenth century Northern European Drawings by Burton L. Dunbar et al., Master Drawings 51, no. 1 (2013): 105-15.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.