Noticed this commentary on Pissaro's painting from last Staurday's Guardian as discussed in earlier posts:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Pissa...rdship.jpg

Julia Neuberger on Camille Pissarro's Lordship Lane Station, Dulwich (1871)

This painting reminds me of my time as rabbi at South London Liberal Synagogue. Though the station no longer exists - it was part of the old Crystal Place high-level railway, serving the crowds who went to see the Crystal Palace exhibition centre in Sydenham - there are many just like it stretching from Herne Hill to Honor Oak and all stations south-east. Pissarro has evoked brilliantly the spread of suburban London. There was huge demand in the 1870s and 80s for respectable housing for clerks who hurried into London every day on the railway. They wanted all mod cons - and they got them, in row after row of identical red-brick houses. The painting shows the houses sketchily, narrow and dark, with little differentiating one from another.

If you walk up and down those same streets of Sydenham and east Dulwich now, only the different names of the identical houses stand out - Mapledene and Ashhurst, Rose Cottage and Oak Lodge - as well as the subtle differences in the stained glass in the front doors. No doubt these "differences" were meant to make their owners and renters feel that they were getting something "unique", rather as all apartments are described as "luxury" these days. But the careful attention to detail in these touches contrasts surprisingly with the fact that many of these houses were poorly built - put up in a hurry in the face of demand and the developers' desire to get rich quick. So it is all too easy to "unbuild" great chunks of them even now, because the bricklaying left something to be desired, or, faced with plumbing problems, present-day owners often find they have no individual connections from their houses to the mains in the streets, with the sewers running in under one house and out under its neighbour, an economy on the developers' part that has caused owners a century or more later innumerable headaches.

Of course Pissarro did not paint this explicitly. But the spread of red-brick terraces, with a train puffing through them, displays no obvious painterly delight - the tone is somewhat dark, and the recognition that open land is going to disappear is already there in the lack of detail in the grass and scrub, apart from the trees to the left of the railway line. But why should Pissarro have wanted to live in an area of London that was even then distinctly unfashionable, though respectable? He had left Paris during the Franco-Prussian war (1870-71) for safety. He was a well-travelled man - born in Danish St Thomas in the West Indies, speaking French at home, English, and Spanish with the native population, and presumably some Danish as well. At the age of 12, he had been sent to a small boarding school in Paris, where his artistic talents were spotted, and when his parents would not give him permission to study painting properly, he ran away with the Danish painter Fritz Melbye, describing it as "bolting to Caracas" to get away from bourgeois life.

His parents were hardly figures of the haute bourgeoisie themselves. His father had arrived from France to sort out his uncle's widow's estate - and begun a liaison with her. She became pregnant; they wanted to marry, but the elders of the synagogue would not let them and did not recognise their marriage till eight years later. It put Pissarro senior off religion for life. And that would fit with Camille Pissarro's own rebellion and unwillingness to be bound by the rules. He had nothing to do with the salons of the French artistic establishment, and was the only artist to exhibit at all eight impressionist shows. An atheist, he married his Catholic wife in a civil ceremony.

So here is an anti-establishment figure, looking at the spread of London, home of the empire and capitalism, southwards and eastwards. For someone who hated the bourgeoisie, these suburbs epitomised it. He rebelled against the "development" he saw, painting it darkly, with the train rushing though. The impermanence and speed of life is here, as is his life of constant change, always on the move. I look at this painting and see a man shocked by the spread of London's tentacles, saddened at the loss of green spaces, seeing darkness envelope a district formerly filled with light. But when he became a grand old man in his 70s, finally recognised as a real master, he might have painted this differently, in glowing colours. So I am eternally grateful that he painted it early in his career, and we can see someone looking at London, an outsider, and expressing his doubts at "progress".