This week, I’ll answer some questions from visitors to the blog and exhibition. As always, if there’s anything you’d like to me to address, just ask about it in the comments.
Q: How did the Museum acquire The Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley?
A: After Dickeson died in 1882, his brother sold the panorama and Dickeson’s collection of artifacts to the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. In 1949, the panorama came to the Saint Louis Art Museum as a loan for an exhibition about the Mississippi River. After the exhibition concluded, the Museum decided to purchase the panorama from the University of Pennsylvania as a rare example of this type of 19th-century visual entertainment.
Q: How will the panorama be displayed once the conservation is complete? Will Museum visitors be able to move the panorama to see each scene?
A: The panorama will be located on the third floor of the Cass Gilbert-designed Main Building, surrounded by other American art. It will be mounted on the same mechanism on which it is currently installed. Because the panorama is still a very fragile work of art, only one scene will be displayed at a given time, but the scene will change periodically throughout the year.
Q: Who would have gone to see Dickeson’s lectures? Were they restricted to the wealthy?
A: The playbill on view in the exhibition states that entry to one of Dickeson’s lectures cost 25 cents, roughly $6.50 today. From that we can tell that these lectures were not restricted to intellectuals or elites, but could have been attended by middle class individuals as well. In fact, many members of the middle class preferred attending lectures accompanied by panoramas over other forms of popular entertainment, like the theater, because such lectures were seen as more respectable.
Q: How long would one of Dickeson’s lectures last?
A: The length of a lecture accompanying a panorama was determined by the length of the panorama – the longer the panorama, the longer the lecture. A lecture based on The Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley would have lasted about an hour.
