The armless artist and the lightning cartoonist: performing popular culture at the Crystal Palace c.1900

Discussions of art at the Crystal Palace have largely focussed on sculpture and architecture from the past contained in its Fine Arts Courts. This chapter explores the role of art via a different trajectory using the paper trail of popular culture contained in the Daily Programme of events and the Crystal Palace’s own magazine, to reveal its connections to two artists who worked at the Palace around 1900. Drawing on contemporary popular journalism of the period, this chapter engages with representations of the artists Bertram Hiles and Herbert Beecroft as part of commercialised forms of leisure available at the Crystal Palace. The case studies of these two artists temporarily working in residence at Sydenham brings into focus the role of the Crystal Palace in modern consumer practices that in turn embraced the visual pleasures of gazing and looking. Far from the high moral tone of the original Hyde Park enterprise, the work of Hiles and Beecroft fused the visual pleasures offered by art with popular entertainment.