This week we have a special guest post by Janeen Turk, senior curatorial assistant for American Art, who provided curatorial oversight for Restoring an American Treasure. I asked her to talk about how panorama paintings were used in the mid-19th century.

As you may know from earlier blog posts, moving panoramas were very long strips of cloth painted with a series of scenes. (The Museum’s panorama is 348 feet long and 7 ½ feet high; it features 25 scenes, each about 14 feet wide.) They were shown to audiences on two upright rollers positioned a set distance apart. The strip was rolled from one roller to the other, so that the painted scenes would pass in front of the rapt audience.

Moving panorama mounted on two-roller display mechanism.

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