which was probably painted in the spring of 1873, ‘arose from the fact that the master of the house had committed suicide in it’. CŽzanne was more circumspect about the matter when he wrote to Count Doria about the painting on 30 June 1889: ‘It is the name given to one of the landscapes that I painted in Auvers.’ In fact the title appears for the first time in the catalogue of the 1874 Impressionist exhibition, where the canvas was shown. The painting was bought by Count Doria – it was the first painting CŽzanne had sold – before passing into Victor Chocquet’s collection. Exceptionally, the painting was exhibited twice more during CŽzanne’s life – in the 1889 exhibition celebrating the Centenary of French Art and at the exhibition of Les Vingts in Brussels in 1890. The Surrealist AndrŽ Breton, writing in 1937, thought he could detect a sense of evil in the composition of the painting. ‘The House of the Hanged Man in particular has always seemed to me to be poised in a most peculiar way … placed in order to reveal something beyond its external aspect as a house, at least in order to show it from its most suspect angle. The horizontal black mark above the window, the defacement of the wall on the left of the foreground are not meaningless details. They reveal, for the painter, the necessity of expressing the connection that is
