Snowy Landscape at South Norwood

In December 1870 Pissarro was in London with his family. Prussian troops had taken over his house at Louveciennes outside Paris, and he had got out. The family settled in Norwood, a run of new suburbs along the ridge south of the city, near the Crystal Palace, which had been taken down in Hyde Park and rebuilt at Sydenham. He was 40, a French painter travelling on a Danish passport, lodging above a dairy on Westow Hill.

About a dozen canvases survive from those months, and snow runs through several of them. He wrote later that in those suburbs he had studied the effects of fog, snow and springtime. The Royal Academy turned his London pictures down that spring. Paul Durand-Ruel, the Paris dealer who had also fled the war and opened rooms on New Bond Street, bought one instead, and went on buying Pissarro for the next 30 years.