1871
oil
canvas
From the collection of Art Institute of Chicago
Dominant colour
The Crystal Palace is a 1871 oil by Camille Pissarro, a Impressionism work, held at Art Institute of Chicago.
The painting shows a large glass-and-iron building surrounded by trees. It's a scene from London, where the artist lived for a while. The building was special because it was made of glass and iron, a new idea at the time, and it was originally in a different part of London before being moved. The artist painted this scene after leaving France due to war. He was interested in the modern architecture of the building. You can learn more about the artist's style by looking at the work of Camille Pissarro.
Camille Pissarro and his family left France in 1870–71 to escape the Prussian invasion and subsequent civil uprising (known as the Commune). They spent these years in Lower Norwood, outside London. In the neighboring town of Sydenham, Pissarro painted the glass-and-iron Crystal Palace, which was originally designed by Joseph Paxton in 1851 for London’s Hyde Park. Although it was immediately acclaimed for its modern architecture, only two years later the building was dismantled and reassembled in Sydenham. (It was destroyed by fire in 1936.) In this small oil painting, Pissarro relegated what…
Charles J. Galloway, Thorneyholme, Kunstford, Cheshire, by 1892 [per Galloway 1892]; sold Sold at the Charles J. Galloway estate sale, Christie’s, London, June 26, 1905, lot 279, to Bernheim–Jeune, Paris, for £68.5 [per Christie’s sale cat. 1905]; sold to Durand-Ruel, Paris, July 4, 1905 [this and the three following per Durand-Ruel Archives, as confirmed by Caroline Durand-Ruel Godfroy, Durand-Ruel Archives, to the Art Institute, Mar. 30, 2000, curatorial object file]; transferred to Durand-Ruel, New York, by January 1931; sold to Henry Johnson Fisher (d. 1965), Greenwich, Conn., June 19,…
Possibly Paris, Galerie Durand-Ruel, Exposition Camille Pissarro: Tableaux, aquarelles, pastels, gouaches, Mar. 3–21, 1894, cat. 6, as Upper Norwood, Crystal Palace, or as cat. 7, as Upper Norwood, Crystal Palace, temps de neige. Glasgow, International Exhibition, May 2–Nov. 1901, cat. 1371, as Crystal Palace, lent by C. J. Galloway, Esq. London, New Gallery, Sixth Exhibition of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters, and Gravers, Jan.–Feb. 1906, cat. 208. Manchester City Art Gallery, Exhibition of Modern French Paintings, Winter 1907–08, cat. 167. Kunsthalle Mannheim, Werke der…
Read the full account in the museum source.
Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro ( piss-AR-oh; French: ; 10 July 1830 – 13 November 1903) was a Danish-French Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painter born on the island of Saint Thomas (now in the US Virgin Islands, but then in the Danish West Indies).
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