In the early 1870s, an immigrant painter watched from a railway footbridge as a locomotive left a station in suburban London. His name was Camille Pissarro and he was developing a style of painting that would soon be called “Impressionism”.
Pissarro and a fellow villager, Claude Monet, stayed in London for only a few months. In April 1874 he was among the painters who organized the first Impressionist exhibition in Paris, the subject of a retrospective that will run through July 14 at the Musée d’Orsay and open September 8 at the National Gallery in Washington, DC.
But London was one of their first muses. Monet painted the River Thames and the Palace of Westminster, among other central landmarks, while Pissarro captured suburban scenes where houses and train lines replaced forests and fields.
I have a particular interest in Pissarro’s train painting because it shows the neighborhood where my wife grew up — in a Victorian house that was rendered as a “smudge” on the impressionist’s canvas, as my father-in-law says.
The railroad, which closed in the 1950s, is now a nature trail where our children forage for blueberries during visits to their grandparents.
On our last visit, I decided to find out what Pissarro saw on that train and what his early London paintings tell us about Britain’s Victorian past. I learned that his strokes captured a moment of dramatic urban transformation whose effects on the layout of the city are still visible today.
My work at Pissarro included long winter walks, trips to museums, a ride on a vintage locomotive and a series of investigative reports surrounding an occult mystery. My main guide was my father-in-law, a former “train runner” with a keen interest in railway history.
“Fog, snow and spring”
A 1990 history of my in-laws area describes the old railroad as “lost.” But, like other locations Pissarro painted in South East London, the location where the pieces once ran was not hard to find. I could see it through a bedroom window, just beyond the camellia and winter jasmine.
Pissarro, a Danish citizen who fled a suburb of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War, was used to being an outsider. He was born on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas to Jewish parents of French descent and moved to Paris in 1855 after a few years in Caracas.
But he was not completely isolated when he arrived in London with his partner, Julie Vellay, and their two young children in December 1870. They stayed with relatives in the south-eastern suburb of Norwood, and he mingled with Monet and other emigrant artists in a central cafe which run by a French wine merchant.
Pissarro, 40, was frustrated by his lack of commercial success and his family was homesick. Vellay described the English language as “a succession of strange noises”.
However, London was not bad for them. Pissarro and Vellay were married there. where he met Paul Durand-Ruel, an art dealer who would sell his work for decades. and where he painted several canvases in his formative impressionist style.
“Monet and I were much delighted with the London landscapes,” he later wrote. “Monet worked in the parks, while I, living in Lower Norwood, at that time a charming suburb, studied the effects of fog, snow and spring.”
Time travel
Pissarro lived near the Crystal Palace, a glass-domed exhibition space that represented Victorian Britain’s sense of modernity and had been moved to South East London from Hyde Park in the 1850s. But the painter, who worked outdoors on wooden clogs , was more interested in the suburban scenes unfolding around the corner.
One of Pissarro’s early London paintings, ‘Fox Hill, Upper Norwood’, shows figures walking down a residential street dusted with snow. When my father-in-law, Alec, drove me there one blustery December morning, we noticed that many of the same houses were still there.
The winter sky was the same mottled gray that Pissarro loved to paint (and which Cat, my long-expatriate wife, loves to hate). I was impressed by how well his silent canvas still captured the area’s rolling hills and refracted sunlight.
We then noticed two people wandering the street holding a print of the same painting. What were the odds of that? It turned out that they were also a Pissarro group, looking in the present for clues about the past.
“It’s just like time travel,” one of them, Libby Watson, told me. “It’s about the closest you can get to that—isn’t it? — to look at the old buildings and imagine you were there.”
A ‘higgledy piggledy’ town
When Pissarro arrived in London, the city was still expanding alongside new railways. The train line he painted in 1871 had opened in 1865 to serve new commuters as well as tourists traveling to Crystal Palace from Victoria Station, near Buckingham Palace.
In 1866 or 1867, my in-laws’ house was built next to the line on a road that was a footpath through fields near the village of Dulwich, the name of which was derived from an Old English term for ‘the meadow where the Dill”. The road was in Forest Hill, a new suburb which, like Norwood, took its name from the Great North Wood, an ancient forest that was mostly cut down as London moved south in the 19th century.
Not everyone liked the pace of change. The Victorian art critic and social philosopher John Ruskin, who lived in the Dulwich area, complained that the fields near his home had been dug up for building sites or cut up by the “wild crossings and windows” of the railways.
“No existing linguistic term known to me is sufficient to describe the forms of filth and the modes of destruction,” wrote Ruskin, who left London in 1872 for England’s Lake District.
The expansion of London in the 19th century was not well organised, but “higgledy piggledy”, as my father-in-law says, and fueled by railway rivalries. The line drawn by Pissarro is run by a company that fought with a neighboring one for passengers. Both were run by “warlike characters” who built unnecessary tracks for the sake of competition, according to railway historian Christian Wolmar.
The competition “led to a complex and inadequate network that still worries commuters today,” Mr. Wolmar wrote in “Fire and Steam,” the 2007 history of Britain’s railways. And as any South East Londoner will tell you, train service in the area remains notoriously patchy.
But for a visiting 19th-century impressionist, it must have been thrilling to watch a giant city devour the countryside in real time.
On the tracks
“Lordship Lane Station, Dulwich,” Pissarro’s 1871 train painting, shows a black engine belching smoke as it approaches the viewer on tracks that cross empty fields. A railroad signal — a metal or wooden material whose placement indicates whether a train driver should stop or go — is suspended from above in a horizontal position.
Today the scene is almost unrecognizable. The train line closed in 1954, almost 18 years after Crystal Palace burned down. Lordship Lane station was later demolished and a local bus route was extended to cover the former railway route.
The house now stands in what was once an open space, and the Pissarro railway bridge painted by lies is in a nature reserve (and temporarily closed for renovation).
The strip of land where tracks once passed by my in-laws place has been turned into a nature trail.
As for the canvas, it now hangs in the Courtauld Gallery in central London. When we visited in December, I was so busy trying to keep our toddlers from destroying priceless works of art that I didn’t get a chance to study them.
But we got a taste of Britain’s railway heritage elsewhere on our journey. One day we took our steam-obsessed boys on a steam train ride along the Bluebell Railway, a heritage line outside of London. These lines were once owned by a railway company that financed the transfer of the Crystal Palace to South East London after the Great Exhibition of 1851.
The children also played on the trains at the London Transport Museum, where an exhibition informed us that the ‘unstructured’ development of the 19th century had transformed the city.
“Lordship Lane” underscores the drama of that transition because Pissarro’s train tracks divide a piece of land that’s still rural from a newly suburban one, Karen Serres, the senior curator of projects at the Courtauld, told me when I called to chat.
And unlike many of Pissarro’s other works, “Lordship Lane” shows no people. When Courtauld staff x-rayed the canvas in 2007, they discovered that a human figure had been painted into a corner of an early version and then painted over.
The train, then, is the main subject. And you can’t avoid it because it suits you right.
The mark at issue
“Lordship Lane” is often compared to “Rain, Steam and Speed”, an 1844 landscape painting by JMW Turner. Pissarro and other French impressionists openly admired English artists, whose work they saw in London museums. Art historians have long debated the extent to which the Impressionists were influenced by British painters.
I don’t have a strong opinion on this. But in London, I was very interested in settling another, even more arcane, historical debate.
In particular, I had been told that ‘Lordship Lane’ is the painting the Courtauld receives the most complaints about. Among other things, critics apparently argue that Pizarro’s Victorian train signal should have been vertical for ‘go’ rather than horizontal for ‘stop’.
Dr. Serres told me that what I had heard was correct. Over the years, he had changed the museum’s description of the painting after railway enthusiasts pointed out mistakes, including its original title ‘Penge Station, Upper Norwood’.
But he never knew what to make of suggestions that the signal should be vertical for “go” because the train appears to be idling at the station. Her own impression was that the train was “slightly beyond” the platform and had already received the signal to proceed. Again, other details in the painting, including the station and train smoke, didn’t seem particularly accurate.
“It’s very difficult to know how accurate these things are, and that really wasn’t his point,” he said. “It was to make a beautiful composition.”
My father-in-law said he was inclined to think the signal was correct because the train seemed to have already passed the station. But he wasn’t entirely sure.
So I called Mr. Wolmar, the author of “Fire and Steam,” who later emailed me to say he agreed.
“The train is well past the signal, so it will have reverted to the default which is horizontal,” he wrote.
