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PAUL CEZANNE
House of the Hanged Man/La Maison du pendu (1873)
Oil on pale primed canvas
55cm X 66cm/211/2 in X 26in

Discouraged by his father, Cez-anne's artistic debut was hesitant, but by 1861 he was spending considerable periods in Paris, encour-aged by his childhood friend the writer Emile Zola (1840-1902). Failing several attempts to get himself admitted to the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Cezanne often studied in the life class at the independent Academic Suisse, and copied from Old Masters like the seventeenth century French classical painter Nicolas Poussin (cl 594-1665) in the Louvre. In 1861 Cezanne met Camille Pissarro at the Academy Suisse, and formed a close friendship which was to be of crucial importance to both artists. Pissarro was older and a more experienced painter than Cezanne. As early as 1857, he had begun painting from nature on the advice of Corot.

Cezanne's style of the 1860s was greatly in-fluenced by Old Masters like Rubens, and by Delacroix, whose work remained a source of inspiration. At that time. Cezanne's subjects were Romantic too - passionate sce'hes of murder and sexual violence were interspersed with more disciplined studies of still lifes, land-scapes and portraits. He used thick, juicy paint and expressive brushwork. with a palette domi-nated by somber colors, especially earths and black. He regularly experimented with palette knife painting.

Although an impassioned abandon often characterized his work of the 1860s, it already contained the germ of his mature style. Strength and vitality, an obsessive dedication, a love of color and the painterly handling of his medium were already apparent. In his drawings, an idiosyncratic, directional hatched structure - which appeared occasionally in his paintings of that decade - was clearly in evi-dence. Cezanne began working out of doors at Pissarro's instigation, and the tight discipline of such work provided the key to organizing his emotional sensibility. From the early 1870s, he and Pissarro worked regularly together in the countryside around Paris, at Auvers and Pon-toise. As a result, Cezanne lightened his palette, and thus began a lifelong research into record-ing his visual sensations before nature.

House of the Hanged Man, a motif from Auvers-sur-Oise. was probably painted in the spring of 1873. It is among the most heavily worked of Cezanne's canvases from this decade, and the rare appearance of a signature, and the fact th at - with Cezanne's consent - it was exhibited several times during his lifetime, suggest that it was one of the rare paintings with which he was satisfied. It was executed on a standard portrait 15 format canvas, whose squarish shape complements the composition and the solid block-like shapes within it. The ground, although undoubtedly pale because of the strik-ing luminosity of the picture, is hard to identify with confidence without removing the work from its frame. The ground is effectively obliterated by the dense, thick opaque paint layer, although slight paint losses at the outer edges reveal both raw canvas and what is possibly a pale gray or putty-colored ground.

Repeated reworkings, over almost the entire surface, characterize this painting. Canvas texture is practically irrelevant, but the effects of stiff, crusty paint dragged across previously dried brushstrokes, are fundamental to the grainy appearance of the picture. The tactile quality of natural surfaces, the crumbly lime-stone walls, roof thatch, and dusty road, are recreated by the built-up paint texture. Stiff hog's hair brushwork is combined with buttery slabs of color applied with a palette knife. In the foreground path this catches on previous brushstrokes, breaking the color to allow earlier colors to show through. This imitates the texture of natural surfaces and creates a vibrant, fragmented paint layer which scatters light, optically enhancing the picture's pale-ness and luminosity. Dabbed brushmarks of subtly varied colors construct the thatched roof and the grass bank beneath it. on which the movement of the brushstrokes suggests the movement into space. This directs the eye to-ward the central pivotal point, which is the sunlit patch of ground between the two main houses.

Despite this visual clue, and despite the artist's use of a foreground path which ought, by tradition, to invite the viewer to enter the pictorial space, other devices work against such an interpretation. The flat lighting and solid paint on the foreground path make it am-biguous - it appears as a barrier, blocking off the pictorial space. Similarly, the curve of the path, down toward the central sunlit patch, is obscured from view as it twists out of sight, thus again inhibiting easy visual access. Furthermore, the brightness of the sunlit patch is equivalent to that of the foreground path. and, by association, they appear to be on the same plane, not receding in depth. This is re-inforced by a slab of palish ochre color which projects left, from the central sunlit patch of ground. By appearing to eat into, or overlap the left grass bank, this 'bite' of color disrupts the relatively coherent overlapping of identifiable natural phenomena - path, grassy bank, path again - thus stressing instead the activity of painting itself.

The solid forms and monumental shapes in this composition therefore appear stacked up, like a wall, and all are tightly interlocking. Cezanne's high viewpoint encourages this be-cause although a distant vista appears between the houses, it is not made easily accessible, and its strong colors bring it toward the spec-tator. Thus there is an inherent tension in the painting, between flatness and naturalistic illusion. This was to remain a characteristic feature of Cezanne's art throughout his long «nd relatively solitary career as an artist.

This painting, which was among the nine works exhibited by Cezanne at the first Impressionist show of 1874, was executed on a squarish, portrait 15 standard canvas. This format admirably suits thehigh viewpoint and block-like buildings selected by the artist, which can be compared with Pissarro's Hillside at 1'Hermitage of the same year. The composition fans out in segments from a low central point.

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