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The House of the Hanged Man by Cezanne
The House of the Hanged ManOil on canvas, 1873 The House of the Hanged Man was one of three works exhibited by Cezanne at the first Impressionist exhibition in Paris in 1874. It is one of the most accomplished of Cezanne’s Impressionist paintings and has more than a passing resemblance to the work of Camille Pissarro, whom he met in the early 1860s and who had advised him to give up browns and earth colors and to paint with primary colors and complementaries. Dr Gachet, who was later Van Gogh’s doctor, and Pissarro encouraged Cezanne to work in the Pontoise region. As a result of his ‘conversion’ to Impressionism by Pissarro, Cezanne abandoned his former romantic-erotic phase and this painting marks the beginning of his alliance with the Impressionists. It was purchased at the first Impressionist exhibition for 300 francs by Count Doria, who acquired other Impressionist paintings at a time when few collectors appreciated them. In The House of the Hanged Man, as in subsequent works, Cezanne forcibly expresses his belief that the form of structures – trees, buildings, mountains or other components of the landscape, portraits or still-lifes – can be represented through the use of color. From this time on, Cezanne began to observe nature closely and to become sensitive to the effects of light on solid objects. He soon found that he was more interested in defining structure than merely superficial color effects. The house in this painting is heavily painted because, as he told Maurice Denis, “I cannot express what I want in one spontaneous stroke so I need to put on more and more paint”. In later life Cezanne was quoted as saying that his greatest revelation was that “sunlight cannot be reproduced, but that it must be represented by something else – by color”. It was by his personal development of this aspect of his brand of Impressionism that Cezanne was to make such a significant contribution to the art of the present century. Own An Original Re-Creation
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Hand-painted in oils by a professional artist
