The Crystal Palace, London
Camille Pissarro , 1871
47.2 × 73.5 cm
Oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago
The Crystal Palace, London (French: Le Crystal Palace, Londres ) is a painting by the French painter Camille Pissarro . Thepicture,47.2 cm high and 73.5 cm wide,paintedin oil on canvas shows a street in Sydenham in south London. The Crystal Palace of the London World's Fair of 1851 can be seen in the background. Pissarro painted the picture in 1871 when hefled to Londonfrom the Franco-Prussian War . The painting has been in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago since 1972.
Image description
The painting shows a street in the London suburb of Sydenham on a spring day in 1871. The street called Crystal Palace Parade , with the sidewalks on both sides, takes up most of the foreground. The street and sidewalks are populated with a few people. On the left the Crystal Palace exhibition building rises in the background, and on the right there are a number of residential buildings. The road and sidewalks run diagonally from the edges to the center of the picture towards a vanishing point on the horizon. A flagpole in front of the Crystal Palace, two gas lanterns on the right sidewalk and the fence posts in front of the houses form vertical lines. In addition, the roofs of the houses and the barrel roof of the transept of the Crystal Palace appear as horizontal lines.
On the street, which is painted in light tones, there are a few carriages, one of which is an open car on the left, which suggests mild temperatures. There are also several groups of pedestrians. On the right sidewalk there is a group of three of a man, woman and child in rear view, whose long shadows fall on the sidewalk towards the viewer. Accordingly, the daylight comes from a low-lying sun and envelops the scene in a diffuse backlight. Other people are a woman crossing the street pushing a stroller, a man with a child some distance to the left of the first gas lamp and a group of women on the left sidewalk. Other people in the background can only be seen vaguely. No face can be seen from any of the persons. Although the scenery is populated with people, it does not show the lively life of a big city, as it would have been found, for example, on Trafalgar Square in the city center, but the calm atmosphere of a suburb.
The two-storey residential buildings on the right-hand side also contribute to this suburban atmosphere. In brick construction with pointed gables, they are typical houses of the English middle class, as can be found in many English suburbs built in the 19th century. The plots are separated from the street with an opaque fence, behind which there are hedges or bushes. There are a few trees in the gardens, whose filigree branches are easy to see. The absence of foliage on the trees suggests an early spring day. Opposite the modest residential buildings is the imposing building of the Crystal Palace with its glass and iron construction across the street. At the time one of the largest buildings in the world, Pissarro cut it to the left edge of the picture and painted the outer surfaces in different shades of gray in diffuse light. The well-known building is not in the center of the picture, but takes a backseat when depicting an everyday scene.
The gray, blue and white sky with its various cloud formations occupies the upper part of the picture. With a moving brushstroke, Pissarro captured the different light situations and gave the sky a lively atmosphere. Even if the sun cannot be seen directly, it can be sensed behind the gray clouds with their white borders at the top of the picture center. The picture is signed and dated lower left “C. Pissarro 1871 ".
Background to the creation of the painting
After the beginning of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Pissarro fled with his pregnant girlfriend Julie Vellay and their children Lucien and Jeanne-Rachel, known as Minette, from his home in Louveciennes near Paris to Lassay-les-Châteaux in the Mayenne department , where the painter friend Ludovic Piette lived. Daughter Adèle-Emma was born here on October 21st, who died on November 5th, 1870. It is possible that the woman with a pram crossing the street in the painting The Crystal Palace, London is an allusion to the birth and loss of the youngest daughter.
A short time later, Pissarro and his family left Lassay-les-Châteaux and embarked for England. His mother Rachel and his brother Alfred and his family had already fled to London and settled in the southern suburb of West Norwood , where Camille Pissarro and his family also moved into an apartment. They stayed in England until the end of the Paris Commune . Shortly before leaving for Paris, Camille Pissarro married his girlfriend Julie Vellay on June 14, 1871 in London.
In the British capital, Pissarro met his painter friend Claude Monet, who had also fled the war, and the Parisian art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel , who bought two paintings from him and organized exhibitions for him. Together with Monet, Pissarro visited various museums and studied the works of the English painters John Constable and William Turner , whose landscape paintings had an influence on his own work. The direct model for the painting The Crystal Palace, London , on the other hand, is the painting Allee von Middelharnis by Meindest Hobbema , which only entered the collection of the London National Gallery in March 1871 , where Pissarro must have seen it. Here is the template for the street that leads directly to the image viewer. In his painting, Pissarro has replaced the avenue trees that characterize the picture as vertical lines in Hobbema with gas lanterns and the flagpole. The cloud formations in both images are also the same. By resorting to an image of the Dutch Baroque and the simultaneous choice of motifs from the modern Crystal Palace, Pissarro cleverly combined the past and the present.
Although it has moved into the background, the Crystal Palace in London is named after the painting. The imposing building was built in 1851 to a design by Joseph Paxton in Hyde Park in central London and served as the central exhibition building for the Great Exhibition , as the first world exhibition was called. The building, mainly made of glass and cast iron, impressed the numerous visitors not only because of its size, but also because of its innovative architecture. The building, initially only intended for the world exhibition, was then dismantled and rebuilt in a park in Sydenham, a southern suburb of London. A photograph from 1854 shows the Crystal Palace at its new location and the surrounding park with the lavishly designed fountains. The Crystal Palace also served as an exhibition building in Sydenham and, as a new London landmark, continued to attract numerous visitors in the following decades until it was destroyed by fire in 1936.
The Crystal Palace was a popular motif among contemporary painters from the start. Briton William White Warren was one of the early artists who painted the Crystal Palace in Sydenham. In his painting The Crystal Palace from Penge (National Gallery, London), created around 1854–1866, he emphasizes the rural surroundings in which the Crystal Palace has now found its destination. His gaze goes from a hill over green meadows to the exhibition building some distance away. The portrayal of the French Charles-François Daubigny , who captured the Crystal Palace in a pencil sketch in 1866, is quite different . Similar to the photograph from 1854, it shows the building from the park side with the large fountain in the foreground. Even several decades after Pissarro, the palace caught the interest of painters. In 1907 Jacques-Émile Blanche created a view of the building entitled Crystal Palace, Sydenham, London ( Museum of London ). In contrast to Pissarro, the Crystal Palace in Blanche takes up almost the entire picture. It is striking that, in contrast to his painting colleagues, Pissarro painted the back of the Crystal Palace. It neither shows the representative front, nor was it about the representation of the monumentality of the building, but it embedded the Crystal Palace in the everyday life of a suburb.
William White Warren:
The Crystal Palace from Penge , around 1854–1866
Charles-François Daubigny:
Crystal Palace , 1866
Jacques-Émile Blanche:
Crystal Palace, Sydenham, London , 1907
Camille Pissarro:
Le Crystal Palace, Upper Norwood , around 1871
_-_The_Crystal_Palace_from_Penge.jpg)
This is also clear in a second view of the Crystal Palace, which Pissarro probably painted a little later in the early summer of 1871. In the painting Le Crystal Palace, Upper Norwood (private collection), he again painted the Crystal Palace in the background. In the foreground a curved country road can be seen, which is bordered by pasture fences. On the horizon, in a slightly hilly landscape, densely packed houses can be seen, above which the transept of the Crystal Palace and one of the flanking water towers protrude on the right edge. The two pictures with the motif of the Crystal Palace line up in a sequence of London cityscapes, which always thematize the landscape of the suburbs. In the pictures from 1870/1871, Pissarro showed the bourgeois life of his London neighborhood. The tourist motifs in the city center, such as views of the Thames with the Parliament building , Tower or St Paul's Cathedral , did not interest Pissarro at that time. It was not until 1890 that the painting Charing Cross Bridge, London ( National Gallery of Art , Washington DC) was created during a further stay in London , in which the Thames and the Parliament building can be seen in the background.
Provenance
Pissarro sold the painting to the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel shortly after its creation, probably in 1871. Then the picture came into the collection of the steam engine manufacturer Charles John Galloway (1833-1904) from Knutsford , Cheshire . After his death, the painting was put up for auction at Christie's London auction house in 1905 and sold to the Parisian art dealer Bernheim-Jeune for 68.5 British shillings on June 24th . Already on July 4, 1905, she sold the picture on to the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. The picture was stored in its New York branch for several decades until it was sold on June 19, 1941 to the collector Henry J. Fisher from Greenwich (Connecticut) . After his death in 1965, his heirs sold the painting to Mr. and Mrs. BE Bensinger of Chicago in 1968 . The Bensinger couple donated the painting to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1972.
literature
- Christoph Becker: Camille Pissarro . Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern-Ruit 1999, ISBN 3-7757-0855-3 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ German title according to Christoph Becker: Camille Pissarro , p. 187.
- ^ French title according to Christoph Becker: Camille Pissarro , p. 187.
- ↑ For the provenance of the painting see http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/110541