section_path: Life/Artistic breakthrough/Arles (1888–89)
section_name: Arles (1888–89)
paragraph_text: Arles (1888–89)
  
  Ill from drink and suffering from smoker's cough, in February 1888, van Gogh sought refuge in Arles. He seems to have moved with thoughts of founding an art colony. The Danish artist Christian Mourier-Petersen was his companion for two months and at first, Arles appeared exotic to van Gogh. In a letter, he described it as a foreign country: "The Zouaves, the brothels, the adorable little Arlésienne going to her First Communion, the priest in his surplice, who looks like a dangerous rhinoceros, the people drinking absinthe, all seem to me creatures from another world."
  
  The time in Arles was one of van Gogh's more prolific periods: he completed 200 paintings and more than 100 drawings and watercolors. He was energized by the local countryside and light; his works from this period are rich in yellow, ultramarine and mauve. They include harvests, wheat fields and general rural landmarks from the area, including The Old Mill (1888), one of seven canvases sent to Pont-Aven on 4 October 1888 in an exchange of works with Paul Gauguin, Émile Bernard, Charles Laval and others.
  
  In March 1888, Vvan Gogh created landscapes using a gridded "perspective frame"and three of those works were shown at the annual exhibition of the Société des Artistes Indépendants. In April, he was visited by the American artist Dodge MacKnight, who was living nearby at Fontvieille.
  
  On 1 May 1888, van Gogh signed a lease for four rooms in the Yellow House. The house at 2 place Lamartine cost 15 francs per month. The rooms were unfurnished and had been uninhabited for months. Because the Yellow House had to be furnished before he could fully move in, van Gogh moved from the Hôtel Carrel to the Café de la Gare on 7 May 1888. He had befriended the Yellow House's proprietors, Joseph and Marie Ginoux, and was able to use it as a studio. Van Gogh wanted a gallery to display his work and started a series of paintings that eventually included Van Gogh's Chair (1888), Bedroom in Arles (1888), The Night Café (1888), Café Terrace at Night (September 1888), Starry Night Over the Rhone (1888), and Still Life: Vase with Twelve Sunflowers (1888), all intended for the decoration for the Yellow House.
  
  Van Gogh wrote that with The Night Café he tried "to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime". When he visited Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in June, he gave lessons to a Zouave second lieutenant – Paul-Eugène Milliet – and painted boats on the sea and the village. MacKnight introduced van Gogh to Eugène Boch, a Belgian painter who sometimes stayed in Fontvieille, and the two exchanged visits in July.