La Maison du pendu, Auvers-sur-Oise

Cézanne exhibited La Maison du pendu at the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874, making it one of his earliest works to receive public attention — though critics responded with mockery. The house at Auvers-sur-Oise, where Cézanne stayed with Dr Gachet (later Van Gogh's physician), gave him a subject that seems to anticipate his mature structural programme: the way buildings, earth, and sky can be organised into interlocking planes of colour. The rough, unfinished quality that critics derided is now recognised as a crucial step toward his distinctive method of building form through modulated colour patches rather than conventional tonal gradation.

Paint is applied in thick, varied strokes that build up the wall surfaces and earth with material solidity. The palette of ochre, grey-green, and blue is relatively restricted, with colour modulation rather than tonal contrast creating the sense of volume. The composition is deliberately stable — weighted and anchored — resisting Impressionist atmospheric dissolution.