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.
But the panorama was only part of the show. A narrator would stand before the panorama explaining the content of each of the scenes and telling amusing anecdotes about the various subjects depicted. Sometimes live music accompanied the narration, to help set the mood for dramatic storms or peaceful landscape views.
Panoramas really took off in the 1840s and 1850s with travel subjects. It was felt that there was a neat correspondence between the experience of actual scenery passing by while traveling down a river or road and the experience of watching the painted scenery of a panorama pass by while viewing a panorama. The success of the travel panoramas was also due to the efforts of panorama proprietors who exerted themselves to promote their shows with over-the-top testimonials and advertisements featuring wild exaggerations.
Here is one of my favorite panorama reviews, which was reprinted in the souvenir booklet for another Mississippi panorama. It was originally penned by a journalist for the the New York Mirror in the 1840s (who like many Victorians had an endless tolerance for adjectives.):
[This] Panorama is one of the most stupendous, grand, and wonderful creations of man: it is impossible to convey by words even a faint conception of this great work of genius and art. One must see it, and then he has all that is grand, noble, beautiful, and sublime, impressed, in vivid colours upon the tablet of his mind, but what language can never describe to others.
Eventually, panoramas of the Mississippi River became the most popular of all, both in the United States and abroad. Besides Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley, there were at least five other Mississippi panoramas, but the rest have all been destroyed or lost. All of that rolling and unrolling was pretty hard on panoramas, and the painted surfaces were damaged over time. Eventually, panoramas fell out of favor, and they were so large and unwieldy that it was difficult to store them. Some were cut into smaller pieces to be used as theater backdrops or discarded, and one was accidentally incinerated.
Even though very few moving panoramas survive, there are still panorama enthusiasts in the world. If you want to meet some of them, they will be gathering in Bulgaria this September for their annual International Panorama Conference (see the guestbook tab for details).
