Interpretive Resource

Camille Pissarro painted nearly a dozen works, including The Crystal Palace, during his brief, self-imposed exile in England at the time of the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune (1870–71). Fleeing his home in Louveciennes, near Paris, to avoid the Prussian invasion of France and subsequent civil uprising in the streets of the capital, he moved his family first to Brittany, on the coast of the English Channel, and then to Lower Norwood, outside of London. In the neighboring suburb of Sydenham, he encountered the soaring, glass-and-iron Crystal Palace. Originally designed by Joseph Paxton in 1851 to house Prince Albert’s "Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations" in London’s Hyde Park, the structure—immediately acknowledged as a landmark of modern architecture—was dismantled and reassembled in Sydenham in 1853. (Fire destroyed it in 1936.)

Surprisingly, Pissarro chose to relegate what had been labeled the world’s largest building to the left portion of the composition, while giving equal space to the recently constructed middle-class homes at the right and to the families and carriages parading down the street in the center. Perhaps the artist, who typically depicted rural settings, was initially captivated by the play of sunlight across two very different forms of contemporary construction; he established a striking juxtaposition between Paxton’s impressive edifice and the ordinary row houses across the way by focusing on atmosphere rather than on disparity of scale. Rendering the Crystal Palace in a range of translucent, aquatic blues that blend into the swirling sky beyond, Pissarro lent the spectacular exhibition hall a light airiness that contrasts with the weighty solidity of the brick residences. Yet the painting accommodates both, presenting a balanced view of a unique, suburban landscape.