The House of the Hanged Man, Auvers-sur-Oise

1873

Oil on canvas, 55.5 × 66.3 cm. Musée d'Orsay, Paris

A steep village lane drops between old houses toward distant rooftops. Puzzling to critics at first, it became the first canvas the painter ever sold to a collector.

Thick, grainy paint is laid on like masonry, so walls, roofs and slopes feel built rather than glimpsed, each plane pressed close against the next.
It was one of three canvases he showed at the first Impressionist exhibition, Paris, 1874.
Look for the road, roofs and slopes, which radiate like spokes from one central point.
Its light colors and broken touch show what he learned while painting beside Pissarro.
It reached the Louvre in 1911 through the bequest of Count Isaac de Camondo.

Its first buyer, Comte Doria, later traded it to the collector Victor Chocquet. When Chocquet's collection was sold in 1899, Camondo bought it on Monet's advice.

Image: Wikimedia Commons · PD-Art