Der Kristallpalast

In the winter of 1870 Pissarro was a refugee. The Prussian army had reached his village outside Paris, and soldiers used his studio as a floor for butchering meat. Hundreds of his canvases were destroyed. He crossed to London and settled in Sydenham, a new suburb built around a building that had no equal at the time. The Crystal Palace, all glass and iron, had gone up for the great exhibition of 1851 and then been moved here piece by piece. Pissarro painted it in 1871 not as a monument but as part of an ordinary street, low and long behind a fresh macadam road, with figures walking and a couple of flags catching the wind. He was studying the London Turner and Constable that season, and it shows in the wide, damp sky.