The oldest and most steadfast of the Impressionists, Camille Pissarro was the only one to exhibit in all eight of their group exhibitions, held between 1874 and 1886. His early career as a Salon landscape painter was a distinguished one; in the 1860's, his submissions were accepted more often than rejected. Yet, he was a rebel at heart, opposing throughout his life the bourgeois values of modern France and committing himself more fervently than other Impressionist painters to social radicalism. Pissarro’s paintings were never as bold and direct as those of Edouard Manet or Claude Monet. Instead, he created a balanced, harmonious Impressionism by applying compositional principles learned from the elderly Camille Corot, and optical techniques learned from the younger Monet. The Crystal Palace is the finest of a series of views painted by Pissarro while he was living in exile in England during the period of the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) and the Paris Commune (1871).

It was in London that the artist met Monet and a man who was to become the major Impressionist art dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel. Durand-Ruel immediately recognized the quality of Pissarro’s paintings and purchased The Crystal Palace from the artist in the year it was painted.

Pissarro chose to compose this landscape around the motif of the roadway, bustling with vehicular and pedestrian activity. Curiously, his model came not from the art of his own time, but from the seventeenth century. In fact, he adapted the composition of Meindert Hobbema’s The Avenue, Middel-harnis of 1689, which he had seen in the National Gallery of Art in London. But, for his subject, Pissarro took the most celebrated modern building of the period. The Crystal Palace, designed by British architect Joseph Paxton, was originally erected for the Great Exhibition of 1851, held in London. Two years later, the building was torn down and re-erected in Sydenham, a southern suburb where Pissarro lived. Rather than making the enormous glass and iron exhibition hall the central motif of his picture, Pissarro simply included it in an everyday scene that encompasses recently constructed middle-class housing. The day is bright, windy, and sunny, probably a weekend afternoon when families are out for a leisurely stroll. The world’s largest building does not dominate the domestic scale of the painting; Pissarro succeeded in making the immense showplace small and light. We do not find it the least overwhelming, nor can we imagine the full-grown trees within its interior or the acres of exhibition space for which it was renowned. Instead, this most modern of architectural achievements fits into this most modern and democratic of landscapes.