Pissarro’s Palace

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In the middle of a pavement in Upper Norwood, a man is standing before an easel. Passers-by stream around him as he works, like a brook around a knee of stone, barely paying him any notice: he’s good at making himself invisible, part of the street furniture.

Not that he’s inconspicuous. Far from it. He’s tall, slightly stooped already under his forty years, his bony face half-obscured by a cascade of greying beard. His clothes alone mark him out as a foreigner. That, and the fact that no British artist thinks a suburban street is a worthy subject for a painting (it’ll take them decades to catch on).

At present, life isn’t easy. He’s not in London by choice: he and his family fled France months earlier under the shadow of a war whipped up by a small man trying to salve his wounded ego. They’re in their third cramped flat in almost as many months. He speaks fluent English and has friends in town, but his partner is sagging under the weight of homesickness and morning sickness (baby number four is on the way, baby number three buried months ago) and his son’s schoolmates mock his broken English and his wooden clogs. The news in the London papers grows grimmer by the day. And there’s the matter of his art. He’s forty and barely getting by. The critics don’t like his work; collectors, even less. None of his contemporaries really gets what he’s trying to do. Only a handful of painters a decade younger think he’s on to something, but then, no one gets what they’re trying to do either.

But for the moment, all that matters is the canvas in front of him, the palette hooked over one thumb, the brushes in his hand, and the need to get everything down before the weather shifts again: he’s lived in London long enough to understand that the sky’s as capricious as one of his children.

The street, puddled with recent rain, slices across the canvas. On one side, the largest building in the world glistens, insubstantial as a glass bauble or a spun-sugar sculpture. He’s more interested in the clouds racing across the washed blue of a March sky, the flag snapping in the breeze, the shadows cast by the day-trippers trundling along the pavement, the blond pennant of a little girl’s hair. He dips his brush into a splodge of green and lays in the waxy leaves of Portuguese laurel peeping over front garden walls, then films the branches of a tree with tender buds. The other trees are bare, a black filigree against red brick. He doesn’t know if he’ll stay in London long enough to see them leaf out. But maybe that doesn’t matter. What matters most is giving form to that envelope of light that holds everything before him.

At last he’s satisfied – well, as satisfied as he’ll ever be. He signs the painting and dates it 1871.

His name is Camille Pissarro.

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Over a century later, the painting hangs on the wall of a museum an ocean and half a continent away, surrounded by others by Pissarro and his younger peers, now recognised as revolutionaries (the good kind). In front of it stands a woman with her small daughter, who’s too short to see the paintings through the forest of grown-up limbs but also too heavy to lift. The woman has developed a way of clearing a space for her child to look at the painting, of reading the label to her quietly enough not to annoy the other visitors. The Crystal Palace, she tells her. The little girl is dazzled. She dreams of stepping into the painting, of touching that shimmering mirage of a building. (She is grievously disappointed when she learns, years later, that the Crystal Palace burned down more than four decades before she was born.)

The little girl grows up among those paintings and is amazed to learn that it is possible to make a living studying them. She spends so much time in libraries and galleries poring over books and paintings of nature that sometimes she forgets about the real thing – though something always pulls her back. At some point she learns that she has something in common with Pissarro – he was Jewish. But the books never make much of this.

Fast-forward a few more years. She’s flat-hunting in Crystal Palace, a neighbourhood that preserves the ghost of the long-gone building. Unlike Pissarro, she is there by choice. (More than choice – she desperately wants to sink roots there.) She trudges the streets in despair; none of the estate agents has anything liveable within her budget. There’s only one left to try, in a red brick building at one corner of the triangle of shopping streets. Above the door is a blue plaque that reads

Camille Pissarro
Impressionist Painter (1830-1903)
stayed on this site
1870-71

They have a studio she can just about afford that came in hours before. It feels like fate.

That grown-up little girl is me.

*

Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro: centuries of exile and itinerance contained in four names. Jacob Abraham, the clearest signifiers of Jewishness, the names that he quietly dropped and which never make it onto museum labels and seldom into books about Impressionism. Pissarro, the surname carried by his Sephardic ancestors when they were booted from Portugal after Ferdinand and Isabella’s religious zealotry spilled across the border. Camille, the gift of his family’s adopted home, France. And yet he was born on the island of St Thomas, then a Danish possession; it was as a Danish citizen that he first set foot in France and, later, as a Danish citizen that he was unable to join the French army when the Prussians invaded and he found himself, like his ancestors, forced to flee.

He wasn’t destined for art, but a boarding school education in France – the traditional rite of passage for the son of a successful merchant – sealed his fate. He spent his spare hours in the Louvre, taking drawing lessons and mooching about with a sketchbook. When he returned to St Thomas his father struggled to mould him into someone who could rule the family haberdashery and dry-goods shop with a firm hand. But Camille chafed at the confines of a life he didn’t fit.

I try to imagine the disputes between father and wayward son. The gritted teeth, the eye-rolling, the hair-clutching, the pleas to God. I wonder if Pissarro père ever exploded in frustration, Jews don’t paint! – yet another entry to that endless litany of what Jews don’t do, repeated by Jew and Gentile alike down the centuries. And, much as it pains me to admit it, he would have had a point. Up until then, the number of Jews who did paint was vanishingly small – both because art school doors had long been barred to them, and because of adherence to a particular interpretation of the Second Commandment: Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image apparently extended far beyond the human form. That was just beginning to change, but look at Europe in the mid-nineteenth century and it sometimes feels
as if each country would only permit the existence of a single Jewish painter: Isaac Levitan in Poland, Simeon Solomon in Britain, Max Liebermann in Germany, Pissarro in France. The flood of Jewish artists descending on Paris and London – Chaim Soutine, Amedeo Modigliani, Marc Chagall, Ossip Zadkine, Sonia Delaunay, Jacques Lipchitz, Man Ray, Mark Gertler, David Bomberg, Jacob Epstein, and on and on – was yet to come. And even then, a Jewish landscape painter was still a rarity.

But Pissarro persevered. He explored St Thomas and then Venezuela with his sketchbook and his friend and mentor, the Danish artist Fritz Melbye. From the beginning, his eyes and his heart were on landscape. Having exhausted what Melbye could teach him, he set sail for France again and enrolled at the École des beaux-arts. He was a good seven years older than most of his fellow students. At an age when he should have been taking the reins of the family business and settling down with a wife, he was studying art, embracing anarchist politics, and living with his mother’s maid, Julie Vellay. Hard to know what his exasperated parents must have thought was worse – frittering his time away on painting or living in sin with a woman who was working-class, illiterate and Catholic.

He tried to paint polite, pretty landscapes that would pass the Salon jury. (They’re competent but his heart clearly wasn’t in it.) He never attempted a heroic landscape in the mould of Claude: surely he felt in his bones that the classical landscape, with its heavy baggage of power and ownership and exclusion, was no subject for a Jew, an immigrant and an anarchist. Alongside his Salon pieces, he was painting something that interested him infinitely more. His lessons with Camille Corot – whose big, silvery, nostalgia-drenched pastorals adorned the walls of a thousand drawing rooms but who still painted for himself the fresh, piercingly observed open-air sketches that he’d pioneered in his youth – confirmed him in his desire to paint nature as it was, not as establishment taste dictated. But the world had moved on since Corot had fled Paris for the Forest of Fontainebleau. For Pissarro, painting nature meant painting nature now: once-wooded hills carved into a patchwork of fields, wire- thin saplings sprouting alongside newly cut roads, factory chimneys erupting among village rooftops. The critics decried it as vulgar and ugly and the buyers declined to open their purses but he kept at it.

He was painting urban nature.

*

Pissarro’s London, in three paintings.

Fox Hill, Upper Norwood, 1870
Dingy clouds scud across a bleached sky. He’s never seen winter light quite so washed-out as this frigid December afternoon. A ribbon of unpaved road winds uphill, trodden and driven snow clinging to its wheel-rutted surface. Houses like a child’s set of blocks hunker on either side, roof tiles rimed silver-white – but the snow must be recent, patches of grass gape through and a holly stands untouched at the left edge of the canvas. A bare tree flings its branches into a gust of wind, the last dry leaves rattling on the tips. (Impossible to tell what it is – hawthorn? Ash? Or a hornbeam, a lonely survivor of the recent destruction of this tranche of ancient woodland?) He grips the brushes in gloved fingers, determined to finish the first painting he’s attempted since landing in London, fighting to commit everything to canvas before his hands grow too numb to obey his brain. Even so, he doesn’t quite succeed: all along the righthand edge, bare canvas shows through brushstrokes that trail off to wisps.

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It takes me years after moving to Crystal Palace to set foot in Fox Hill, even though it lies a five-minute walk from my flat. I don’t know what holds me back – perhaps fear of disappointment at the inevitable changes to the scene. Finally an out-of-town friend drags me there one August twilight.

The road is paved now. Some of the 1870s gaps between houses have been filled with ugly post-war boxes. But the curve of the road meandering up the rise hasn’t changed. I wonder if Pissarro walked past those two yellow-brick houses. The beeches and limes on the edge of the playing field would have been saplings when he stood painting in the middle of the road.

The most frightening change isn’t visible this time of year. The dumping of snow that coated the road ruts and froze Pissarro’s fingers doesn’t happen anymore. Being on the second-highest point in London, Crystal Palace is always a degree or two colder than the centre of town and on the handful of occasions it snows during my eight years living there, the snow settles here longer than anywhere else – but seldom more than a dusting, seldom longer than half a day. I can’t look at this painting without feeling a twist of grief and fear in my gut. The snows of yesteryear are gone for good.

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The Crystal Palace, Upper Norwood, c. 1871
Early spring, the air’s beginning to warm over Anerley Hill, even if patches of snow still scatter the ground like flung handfuls of torn paper. So is the earth piled up behind the fence encircling a building site. The seeds of grass and wayside plants – the top-hatted man and red-shawled woman passing by arm-in-arm no doubt think of them as ‘weeds’ – that lay dormant in the churned soil all winter have begun to germinate, filming raw heaps of soil in soft green.

Apart from the seedlings, the only green visible from the hill is the crowns of two trees struggling their way out of a pair of gardens wedged between houses. Beyond, the humped bulk of the Crystal Palace and its tower stalk the horizon like a disorientated apatosaurus in ponderous search of a meal. Not much to graze on here.

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My first sight of this painting is on a slide in my MA tutor’s study at the Courtauld Institute of Art. The eight of us, crammed shoulder to shoulder round his table, burst into titters at how incongruous, how... well, how ridiculous the Crystal Palace looks, shoved to the horizon, out of proportion to its suburban surroundings. Our discussion is about how Pissarro was pioneering a modern way of depicting the city. We talk about city and country as a binary, the one wholly unable to exist wherever the other is.

Years later, I stumble across the painting in a book and something jars. I stop, look closer. How did I get it so wrong before? The swarm of elongated black flecks in the foreground isn’t dirt on the road. It’s a flock of sparrows. Now I can see how the pavement hums with their twittering as they forage among the cobbles, the motion of Pissarro’s brush an echo of the flickering dance of wings and feet.

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Lordship Lane Station, Dulwich, 1871
He should have known it was a crazy idea. Standing in the middle of a pavement to paint is one thing. Standing on a railway bridge when the weather can’t make up its mind is madness. But how else is he going to capture a train head on, chugging along the new-laid track burrowing into the hills?

The Crystal Palace High Level Line was built six years prior to ferry day-trippers to the Crystal Palace. Already, it’s brought more than passing trade: the slopes on either side have been shorn of trees, red-brick villas sprouting in their place like monstrous amanita muscaria. To the left of the track, a fence corrals a thicket of young oaks, their fate undecided. He wonders if they’re bound for slaughter and the timberyard, or captivity in someone’s future garden. He paints them broadly but one glance at their rugged silhouettes and it’s obvious what they are; he doesn’t need fussy detail to capture their oakness. To the right, a man stands on the slope overlooking the railway cutting, clutching a scythe.

After he sets the canvas to dry in his makeshift studio, the painted man with the scythe begins to bother him. His size in relation to the rest of the scene feels off. But no, that’s not it. That tiny, stranded figure doggedly carrying on his old country ways as suburbia sweeps them away – isn’t that a bit too on the nose? In a fit of pique, he squeezes a blob of viridian onto his palette and scrubs him out of the picture.

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Lordship Lane Station no longer exists. It closed in 1954 when the line was decommissioned, but the Cox’s Walk footbridge on which Pissarro stood to paint it still stands near one of the entrances to Sydenham Hill Wood, part of the largest remaining tract of the Great North Wood that once stretched from Deptford to Croydon. One early autumn day I venture there to see what it looks like now.

The bridge passes through a luminous tunnel of oak and hornbeam, their trunks corseted in ivy. The disused track bed has disappeared under a carpet of fallen leaves and hornbeam seedwings. Somewhere overhead a woodpecker is drumming. A late red admiral alights on a branch inches from my face and is gone again before I can blink. Of the villas, little trace remains apart from the odd garden exotic (a Chilean pine, a Japanese maple) lurking amongst the oaks. It’s a mixture of ancient and revenant woodland and that term for secondary or new growth feels just right – this wood is both resurgent and a ghost. The only indication that we’re still in London is the graffiti spiralling round the stone piers.

I’d like to think that somewhere, Pissarro is smiling. Here at least, nature’s gotten its own back.

*

More than a century on, Pissarro’s Crystal Palace became mine. And like him, I set out in search of urban nature.

I wonder if he ever imagined what Crystal Palace would look like without its Palace. The park might appear a post-apocalyptic ruin to nineteenth-century eyes: allées of London planes that once led up to the Palace and now lead nowhere in particular, crumbling concrete sphinxes holding court over a terrace populated by squirrels and the occasional runner, an unexpectedly ancient oak, another marooned survivor of the Great North Wood, standing beside a clearly artificial pond and overlooking an equally crumbling menagerie of cement dinosaurs stalked by a real heron. Every August I’d put on my rattiest clothes and plunge into the bramble curtaining the lowest terrace, emerging with scratched hands, crimson lips and enough berries to carry some memory of summer into winter. Every few years someone put forward yet another outlandish scheme for rebuilding the Palace. Although the art historian in me would have loved a glimpse of it in all its glass-and-iron splendour, I drew a sigh of relief as every scheme foundered. What the Crystal Palace stood for – the arrogance and prejudice of empire – is best left to moulder as broken statues and crumbs of masonry, gradually being drawn back into the earth by moss and bramble, lichen and ivy.

Whenever I wasn’t in the park, I spent far too much time gazing longingly into front gardens, watching blossoms open, flourish and perish: Golden Apeldoorn tulips and forget-me-nots, pink clouds of Japanese cherry, dripping grape-bunches of wisteria, the electric blue fizz of ceanothus and the banked flames of pyracantha and berberis. Flowers and shrubs now so commonplace we forget there was a time they weren’t here, but many of them (bar the tulips and forget-me-nots) would have been recent introductions to British gardens when Pissarro arrived in 1870.

Pissarro didn’t stay in London long enough to consider planting a garden. Even if he’d wanted to, packing up and moving from one rented flat to another every few months – still a depressing fact of London life a century and a half later – would have prevented him from doing so. I wonder if this bothered him; looking at the many paintings of meadows, orchards and gardens he made later in life, after he’d settled in rural Normandy, it’s easy to assume that being surrounded by all those suburban parks and gardens might have filled him with longing. There’s a painting of a meadow planted with young trees he made three years after he moved to Eragny, the whole scene bathed in a golden haze, and the possessive pride contained in his title makes my heart ache: Late Afternoon in Our Meadow. Less than a century before, he would not have been allowed to own land in France.

But I could make a garden. Or at least, I dared to think I could.

Before I moved to Crystal Palace, gardening had never crossed my mind. Two of the student houses where I’d lived in north London had gardens, unlovely affairs of scrubby grass and what I then considered weeds, garnished with the odd piece of broken-down garden furniture. But my time and headspace, and those of my housemates, were too crammed with essay deadlines and parties and romantic angst, exhibitions and trips and part-time jobs and the soul-destroying grind of job and postdoc applications, to admit an inkling of desire to plant something. And even had we wanted to, the impermanence of life in such houses would have put us off: why break your back to plant a garden you’ll never stay long enough to see flourish?

But now I’d eked out some sort of permanence in London. What more fitting way to put down roots than to claim some tiny corner of it as my own by making it green? My Crystal Palace flat had a shared terrace. The decking had never been sealed and it creaked alarmingly and split in places; with a landlord who took weeks of begging and pleading to fix a broken boiler or fridge, I quickly learned to choose my battles, and the decking wasn’t one worth fighting. My dream of building a raised bed and filling it with flowers and herbs, as a friend with a sturdier terrace had done, would have to remain a dream. On a terrace that I barely trusted to take the weight of my body, an aluminium table and chairs, and a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, all I could hope to plant in was small pots.

There was a nursery tucked in a back street near my flat. As soon as spring grudgingly reared its head, I trooped up and down the hill, hauling stacks of clay pots, bags of compost, a trowel and gloves (the first gardening tools I’d ever owned), and young herbs straining at their temporary housing: rosemary, chervil, parsley, coriander, thyme. I potted up my plants and stepped back to watch them flourish. Within three months they were all dead.

Growing indoors was no better. The only surface where I could put plants was my kitchen windowsill, a meagre square of light buffeted by draughts and next to an electric heater that failed to keep the flat warm but which reliably sucked the moisture from any soil in its vicinity. Everything I placed on that sill died: the tuberous begonia a friend gave me as a housewarming gift, a chilli plant, countless supermarket pots of basil and thyme. I began to believe I was cursed – which was less painful than admitting that perhaps I was a terrible gardener. That I hadn’t inherited my mother’s green thumb, or her patience. That more than a decade of not having the time or space or means to care for plants meant that now I was unfit to do so.

Nonetheless, I persevered. The next spring I hauled home another bag of compost and a bottle of organic seaweed feed. I bought half a dozen cherry tomato plants from the farmer’s market. The velvet nap of the stems under my fingertips, the sharp sappy scent of the leaves I pinched off after I potted them up, transported me straight to my mother’s garden. Of all the vegetables she grew, the tomatoes were her pride and joy – not least because every ripe fruit she managed to wrest from a patch of heavy clay that was at best only dappled with sun was a triumph. My brother and I used to drive her to distraction by treating the garden like a sweetshop, gobbling the cherry tomatoes off the vines as soon as they ripened, leaving only hard green fruit behind. A few months’ tender care and I’d be able to graze on my own tomatoes with impunity.

I cossetted my tomatoes, fed and watered them scrupulously, pinched off suckers and tried my best to encourage them to grow tall and strong. In spite of all, they remained sad and leggy. None of them produced more than a half-dozen fruits; one or two didn’t fruit at all. And yet I refused to give up. The following spring I tried again: same result. It was the same the year after, and the year after that.

The fourth summer of my attempts at growing tomatoes, my friend Kira invited me to a housewarming. Although several of my friends gardened on balconies, windowsills and terraces (all more successfully than I did), she was the first to have a proper garden. It wasn’t large, but in the few months she and her husband had been tending it, they’d put a lot of love into it. Not least into the row of lush tomato plants baking in the sun, dripping with fruit.

I told her about my endless failed attempts. She could have laughed in my face – many gardeners no doubt would – but instead she gently explained that the problem was the pots. ‘The roots grow to at least 30 centimetres. They need more room.’

When I got home, I gave the tomatoes a drink and knocked them from their pots. Each root ball resembled a solid clump of cooked vermicelli, moulded into a Rachel Whiteread-style cast of the inside of the pot; barely any soil was visible. Every plant was rootbound.

I re-potted my strangled tomatoes. That night I dropped them at a guerrilla community garden that had sprung up in a hidden corner within the Crystal Palace Triangle, hoping that someone else would be able to provide them the care I couldn’t. (Someone must have, for the next day they were gone.)

Thus ended my attempts at terrace gardening. I couldn’t help seeing myself in those tomatoes, though. I, too, had grown rootbound. I’d never meant to stay in that flat; when I first took it, I assumed I’d be moving in with my then-boyfriend in a year or two. But our relationship ended at exactly the point I’d hoped to move out. And then I found I couldn’t move, caged in by rising rents (and no matter how mercilessly my landlord hiked mine, it was still cheaper than anything else in the area). Even if I’d been able to raise the deposit on another flat, as a foreigner I was ineligible for a mortgage. I was straining at the walls of a flat I’d long outgrown and that would never truly be home. A flat where I couldn’t grow anything. Where I’d tried to put down roots and failed.

(Writing this, I want to go back in time and tell my past self not to despair: in the not-too-distant future you will have a British passport, you will get married, you and your husband will make a home together with a garden in which you will grow tulips and roses and tomatoes whose roots spread freely in open ground. But would she have believed me?)

*

In Pissarro’s last London paintings, sunlight coats everything like a slick of butter. No doubt it’s down to the time of year – even the most homesick foreigner, the most ardent London-hater, would melt in the face of May – but I can’t help wondering if it isn’t the golden light of advance nostalgia, if knowing that he would soon leave made him start to miss this corner of the world while he was still there.

In his final months in London, he gravitates to Dulwich and Sydenham – St Stephen’s Church, the college and the ponds, expanses of green so lush you want to plunge in headlong and roll around snorting like a dog. He has even less time for minute detail than usual; trees and buildings blur together as if observed at speed. As if each canvas was painted during the minutes snatched between packing, between making all the arrangements to restart his abruptly halted life in Paris, between repairing to the registry office with Julie and finally marrying her with his mother’s tacit, if grudging, approval.

I, too, come to know these landscapes at the point where speed and advance nostalgia collide. After giving up my dreams of gardening, I turn to something more achievable within the present constraints of my life – long-distance running. With my chosen marathon looming ever closer, Crystal Palace, Dulwich, Sydenham and Herne Hill become my training ground, the views I’ve come to know through Pissarro’s eyes flashing past in a blur. Even at speed I can’t help botanising on the asphalt, resenting the tyranny of my running watch, of not being able to pause and sniff a flower or properly identify a shrub.

Although I have hung on longer than Pissarro – almost eight years – this spring of running proves to be my last in Crystal Palace. In a few months I’ll be leaving to move in with the man I will marry, and though this is something I dearly want, I, too, already ache for what I’ll miss. Crystal Palace is a place neither Pissarro nor I managed to put down roots, even though it helped us both on the path to where we were going. And although it’s far from the only place in London where foxes lurk among railway brambles and ivy swarms over the ruins of industry and empire, it was where I first opened my eyes to urban nature.

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Pissarro made several further visits to London. Happier times: he was older, more settled, money worries dwindling, his artistic star rising. France was at peace; he was in London because he wanted to be there, not because he had nowhere else to go. But on these trips, he stuck to more obvious tourist magnets like Hyde Park, or the idyllic new suburbs to the west.

There is no evidence to suggest that he ever set foot in Crystal Palace again.