In the early 1870s, an exiled artist was watching from a railway footbridge as a steam locomotive departed from a station just outside London. His name was Camille Pissarro, and he was developing a style of open-air painting that would soon be called “Impressionism.”
Pissarro and fellow exile Claude Monet stayed in London for only a few months. By April 1874, they were among the first Impressionist artists to have their works exhibited in Paris. The retrospective runs until July 14 at the Musée d'Orsay and opens at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, on September 8.
But London was one of their early muses: Monet painted urban landmarks like the River Thames and the Palace of Westminster, while Pissarro painted suburban landscapes where houses and railway tracks gave way to woodland and farmland.
I have a special interest in Pissarro's train painting because it depicts the neighborhood my wife grew up in, the Victorian houses that her father-in-law describes as “blots” on the impressionist painters' canvases.
Abandoned in the 1950s, the railroad is now a nature trail where children pick blackberries when visiting their grandparents.
On my last visit, I decided to find out what Pissarro saw on that train and what his early paintings of London say about Victorian England. I learned that his brushstrokes captured a moment of dramatic change in the city, and that its influence on urban planning is still visible today.
My Pissarro project involved long winter walks, trips to museums, rides on vintage locomotives, and a bit of investigative journalism surrounding arcane mysteries. My main guide was my father-in-law, a former “train nut” with a passionate interest in railroad history.
“Fog, Snow, and Spring”
A 1990 history book of my parents-in-law's area describes the old railway as “lost,” but as with other places Pissarro painted in southeast London, the spot where the tracks once ran isn't hard to spot, visible from my bedroom window, beyond the camellias and winter jasmine.
Pissarro was a Dane who had fled the Parisian countryside during the Franco-Prussian War and was used to being an outsider: born to French-Jewish parents on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas, he spent a few years in Caracas before moving to Paris in 1855.
But he was not entirely isolated when he arrived in London in December 1870 with his partner Julie Verey and their two young children. They stayed with relatives in the south-eastern suburb of Norwood, and he socialized with Monet and other exiled artists at a downtown café run by a French wine merchant.
At 40, Pissarro was frustrated by his lack of commercial success, his family was homesick, and Verey described the English language as “a strange series of noises.”
But London wasn't all bad for them: it was where Pissarro and Verey were married, where Pissarro met the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who would sell his work to him for decades, and where he painted several of the canvases that shaped the Impressionist style.
“Monet and I were passionately fascinated by the London landscape,” he later wrote. “Monet worked in the parks and I lived in Lower Norwood, then an attractive suburb, and we studied the effects of fog, snow and the spring season.”
time travel
Pissarro lived near the Crystal Palace, the glass-domed exhibition space that was a symbol of Victorian British modernity and which moved from Hyde Park to southeast London in the 1850s, but the artist, who worked outdoors in wooden clogs, was more interested in the suburban landscape just around the corner.
One of Pissarro's earliest paintings from London, “Fox Hill, Upper Norwood,” shows a figure walking through a snow-covered residential street, and when my father-in-law, Alec, took me there on a windy December morning, we noticed that many of the houses were still there as they had been before.
The winter sky was the same dappled grey that Pissarro loved to paint (and that my wife, Kat, who lived abroad for many years, hated), and I was struck by how well his muted canvases captured the region's rolling hills and refracted sunlight.
Then we noticed two people walking down the street holding a print of the same painting. What a coincidence! It turned out they were also Pissarro enthusiasts, people searching the present for clues to the past.
“It's like time travel,” one of them, Libby Watson, told me. “It's the closest thing to that, seeing an old building and imagining you're there, right?”
Cluttered city
When Pissarro arrived in London, the city was still expanding with the opening of a new railway line: the line he drew in 1871 had only just opened in 1865 to serve commuters to the suburbs as well as tourists heading from Victoria Station near Buckingham Palace to Crystal Palace.
In 1866 or 1867, my parents-in-law's house was built beside the railway line on a street that had once been a footpath through fields near the village of Dulwich, derived from an Old English word meaning “meadow where dill grows”.The street was in the relatively new suburb of Forest Hill, which, like Norwood, was named after Great North Wood, an ancient woodland that was largely cleared during London's rapid shift south in the 19th century.
Not everyone liked the pace of change: the Victorian art critic and social philosopher John Ruskin, who lived in Dulwich, complained that fields near his house were being dug up for building sites and cut through by the “wild crossings and parallelings” of railways.
“No existing language I know is adequate to describe the form of filth and the aspect of desolation,” Ruskin wrote after leaving London for England's Lake District in 1872.
London's expansion in the 19th century was, as my father-in-law put it, messy and driven by competition between railways. The line Pissarro describes was run by a company that was fighting with its neighbour for passengers. According to railway historian Christian Walmer, both companies were run by “belligerent characters” who built unnecessary tracks in order to compete.
The result of this competition “was a complex, underinvested network that continues to cause suffering for commuters today,” Walmer wrote in “Fire and Steam,” a 2007 history of Britain's railways. As any southeast Londoner will tell you, rail services there remain notoriously unreliable.
But for the Impressionist painters who visited in the 19th century, it must have been fascinating to watch the megalopolis engulf the countryside in real time.
On Tracks
Pissarro's 1871 painting of a train, “Lordship Lane Station, Dulwich,” shows a smoking black locomotive approaching the viewer on tracks through an empty field. Hovering horizontally overhead is a railway signal, a metal or wooden device that tells the train driver whether to stop or go ahead.
The scene is almost unrecognisable today: the railway line was closed in 1954, some 18 years after Crystal Palace burned. Lordship Lane station was later demolished and the local bus route was extended to cover the former railway line.
Houses now stand on what was once a vacant lot, and the railway bridge where Pissarro painted lies within a nature reserve (currently temporarily closed for restoration works).
A narrow strip of land where train tracks once ran past my parents-in-law's house has been transformed into a nature trail.
The canvas is currently on display at the Courtauld Gallery in central London, but during a visit in December I was too busy trying to stop a toddler from destroying the priceless work of art that I didn't get much of a chance to look at it closely.
But our travels also provided a glimpse into Britain's railway history. One day we took our locomotive-crazy sons for a steam train ride on the Bluebell Railway, a historic line just outside London that was once owned by the railway company that funded the move of Crystal Palace to southeast London after the Great Exhibition of 1851.
The kids played on trains at the London Transport Museum, where they learned in an exhibit about how “unstructured” growth in the 19th century transformed the city.
“Lordship Lane” highlights the drama of that transition, with Pissarro's railway tracks still dividing the rural property from the newly suburbanized land, Karen Serres, head curator of paintings at the Courtauld Institute of Art, told me when I spoke by phone.
Also, unlike many of Pissarro's other works, Lordship Lane contains no figures; when staff at the Courtauld Gallery had the canvas x-rayed in 2007, they found that an earlier work had contained a figure in a corner that had later been painted over.
So the subject is the train. It's coming straight towards you and you can't avoid it.
Problem Signals
“Lordship Lane” is often compared to J. M. W. Turner's 1844 landscape painting, “Rain, Steam, and Speed.” Pissarro and other French Impressionists had seen Turner's work in London museums and openly admired the British painters, and art historians have long debated the extent to which the Impressionists were influenced by them.
I have no strong opinion on that, but in London I was very interested in resolving another, even more puzzling, historical controversy.
In particular, I had heard that Lordship Lane was the painting for which the Courtauld had received the most complaints: critics seemed to argue that Pissarro's Victorian train signals should have been vertical for “go” rather than horizontal for “stop.”
Dr Serres said what I had heard was correct: over the years, she had changed the painting's caption in the museum after railway enthusiasts pointed out errors, including its original title, “Penge Station, Upper Norwood”.
However, she was unsure what to think about the suggestion that the signalling should be vertical, as the train appears to be stopped at the station – her own impression was that the train had “just cleared” the platform and was already signalling – but other details in the painting, such as the station and the train smoke, did not seem particularly accurate.
“It's very hard to know how completely accurate these things are, and in fact that was never his aim,” she said. “It was to create beautiful compositions.”
My father-in-law said he thought the signal was correct because it looked like the train had already passed through the station, but he wasn't entirely sure.
So I called Mr. Walmer, author of Fire and Steam, and he later emailed me to say he agreed.
“The train is well past the signal and should be back in horizontal default,” he wrote.