Il viale, Sydenham

Pissarro painted this as a refugee. When Prussian armies pushed into France in 1870 he left his home at Louveciennes outside Paris and crossed to London with his family, and most of the canvases he stored behind him were ruined during the occupation. He settled in the leafy southern suburbs near the Crystal Palace and painted about a dozen views of them. This is Lawrie Park Avenue in Sydenham on a bright spring day in 1871, the spire of a church built a few decades earlier rising at the end of the street, well-dressed figures walking under the young trees. Though it looks caught on the spot, he worked it up indoors. Within a few weeks he was back in France, where he found much of his earlier work destroyed.