Cézanne, Paul - The House of the Hanged Man, Auvers-sur-Oise (1874)

The House of the Hanged Man

Cézanne didn’t go to Auvers-sur-Oise to paint pretty cottages. He went there to break the back of traditional perspective. By 1873, France was a bruised nation recovering from the Franco-Prussian War and the literal fires of the Paris Commune. While the city of Paris was being scrubbed clean and rebuilt with sterile boulevards, the artists were fleeing to the dirt and woodsmoke of the villages. They were looking for something honest.

The House of the Hanged Man is a misnomer that stuck. No one died there, but the title provided a dark, heavy gravity that suited Cézanne’s mood. He was moving away from the airy flickers of his friend Pissarro and toward something much denser. He used a palette knife like a mason uses a trowel. He layered the oil until the canvas felt like a crust of earth or an old stone wall. It wasn't about the light hitting the house. It was about the weight of the house itself.

When this work appeared at the First Impressionist Exhibition in 1874, the critics saw a slur. They laughed at the lack of finish. They didn't understand that Cézanne was burying the old world under layers of lead paint. He wasn't interested in the fleeting moment anymore. He was interested in the structure underneath the skin of the world. This painting was his first real victory. Count Armand Doria bought it for 300 francs. It was the first time someone paid for the struggle Cézanne put into the grain of the canvas.

References

Rewald, John. The Paintings of Paul Cézanne: A Catalogue Raisonné. New York: Abrams, 1996.

Brettell, Richard R. Pissarro and Pontoise: The Painter in a Landscape. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.

House, John. Impressionism: Paint and Politics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.

Cézanne, Paul. Paul Cézanne, Letters. Edited by John Rewald. New York: Da Capo Press, 1995.