The search for health and calm was an arduous one for Van Gogh, and the Expressionists seized on the jarring signs of the struggle in his paintings. It's important, though, not to overlook Van Gogh's almost bucolic quest. He left Paris in early 1888, where he had been staying with (and mooching off) his art-dealer brother, Theo, and trying in vain to sell his own cityscapes and flower pictures. Van Gogh had always found the countryside "healthy and invigorating," as he put it. He loved Millet and other glorifiers of the French countryside and had a special fondness for Harriet Beecher Stowe's portrait of American "peasants." In Arles, he reread Uncle Tom's Cabin "with extreme attention," as he told his sister, and looked for images of the life of simple dignity that he was after. Waiting for beds and furniture to put in his bare room in the Yellow House at Arles, he spent a week in the coastal town of Saintes-Maries-de-la Mer, known for its colorfully clad gypsies. While painting gypsylike boats on the shore, Van Gogh found himself thinking longingly of family ties. His cluster of boats, one of which carries the name Amitié, seems a portrait of a harmonious family, with the upright and luminous yellow mast for reassuring support. The dazzling colors, combined in unexpected ways, give each boat a distinctive character and a dynamic rhythm Van Gogh associated with Japanese prints.