Nine-Mile Mirrors and Bunyan Tableaux

From the late 1840's through to the late 1860's, the English-speaking world went panorama crazy. In many ways, it was Banvard's panorama of the Mississippi that started it all; his success in England, and later in the United States, was so enormous that he was able to build himself an enormous mansion, modeled on Windsor Castle, which earned the sobriquet "Banvard's Folly" from his neighbors on Long Island. Suddenly, the proprietorship of a moving panorama was a route to fame and fortune unlike any other medium of its day; there were panoramas of the Great Lakes, Mammoth Cave, the Overland Mail to India, the Arctic Regions, and the Oregon Trail. Landscapes and current events were joined by proselytizing panoramas, including one of Garibaldi's campaign to unite Italy, at the conclusion of which volunteers were recruited to join his army. Or Henry "Box" Brown, who had infamously escaped from slavery by mailing himself northward in a shipping crate, traversed England with a panorama of his life, at the conclusion of which he jumped out of a replica box. And, amidst the "true and accurate" representations of all parts of the globe, fantastical subjects were not unknown; Milton's Pandemonium, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progess, and various tales from classical mythology and the Bible were common. It was, indeed, one of these "Bible Scrolls" that caught Mark Twain's attention; in his parodic story "The Scriptural Panoramist," Twain made great fun of a showman with a Bible-story panorama who, his regular accompanist unavailable, hired the piano player from a local saloon, who ruined one religious moment after another by playing popular drinking songs.

With the emergence of film though, the days of moving panoramas were numbered. In 1903, the veteran panorama showman Rufus C. Somerby reflected on his career in the pages of The Billboard, a showman's periodical that later became Billboard Magazine. Writing as "The Old Panoramist," he reflected on the decline and fall of a medium which had once been well-known in nearly every town in America.

There's hope though -- lately, the medium has been revived, on a somewhat smaller scale, by "Crankies." These mid-sized moving panoramas -- usually between 24 and 40 inches tall and designed to rest upon a table-top -- have taken up all kinds of new forms and themes, even using old-fashioned tricks such as shadow-puppets and back-projection. The finest artists of this new old medium, such as Balimore's Katherine Fahey, have broken new ground, as can be seen in her crankies Pickett's Charge and Francis Whitmore's Wife. The medium lives!

NB: I'd encourage each of you to visit Sue Truman's page of Crankies, view a few, and perhaps comment on one.

Illusions in Motion

From the 1820's through to the 1890's, a new form of visual spectacle swept the world: the "moving" panorama. Unlike its circular and static namesake, the moving panorama actually did move, with new scenes emerging one by one from the right-hand side of the painting, while old scenes scrolled away. It was, above all, a narrative form, perfectly suited for journeys from one place to another, as well a for representing current events or familiar stories, ranging from Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (a panel from a panorama of which is shown above) to the military campaigns of Garibaldi (this panorama is preserved at Brown University) to journeys up (or down) the Mississippi River.

Unlike great-circle panoramas, these scrolling painting required a narrator, typically a man in a top hat and tails who used a pointer to direct attention to specific parts of the canvas, and who served as a sort of conductor for this virtual journey. Most were professional showmen, but sometimes the attempt was made to have someone actually involved with the scenes depicted appear at, or even narrate, the painting. The pre-eminent Scottish firm of Messrs. Marshall & Co. hired a survivor from the wreck of the Medusa to appear with their depiction of the subject; the combined effect was so dramatic that it forced the exhibition of Géricault's great painting of "The Raft of the Medusa" -- then exhibiting in the same town -- out of business. Similarly, exhibitors of panoramas about Arctic exploration often hired the explorers themselves to narrate the scenes.

And it was not just the canvas the moved. Most had music, and employed a variety of special effects: lantern images were projected from behind the canvas; smoke was blown through holes in the cloth when the painted "cannons" were meant to fire; colored lights and sometimes even the shaking of the fabric were also used. Moving panoramas also had the advantage that they were far more portable than their fixed cousins, and could travel from town to town via horse-drawn carriage or train; in this manner they criss-crossed the UK, the US, and many other countries, sometimes being shown for more than a decade, until the paint began to chip off.  They were also easily copied, and at times there might be half-a-dozen of the same subject appearing at multiple venues. Lastly, as a portable medium, the size of its public was limited only by the endurance of the panoramist and his or her ability to find fresh audiences; some of the most widespread and durable ones may well have had audiences in the millions.

Human Zoos

The display of humans to other humans has taken many forms over the ages, but surely there have been few as problematic, and often degrading, as the practice of displaying human beings in zoos. The image at left is from Carl Hagenbeck's Hamburg "Tierpark" (Animal Park), and shows a group of Labrador Inuit who appeared there in the fall of 1911. The group included Nancy Columbia, whom Arctic historian Kenn Harper has aptly described as the most famous Inuk of her day; she was actually born in an Eskimo display at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, and over the course of her career appeared at well over a dozen world's fairs and expositions from Seattle to St. Louis to Madrid and Paris.

Inuit, of course, were very far from the only indigenous peoples displayed in these venues: there were Samoans, "Igarottes," Native American "Indians," Zulu warriors from "Darkest Africa," and even villages of seemingly civilized folk ("The Streets of Cairo," "Japanese Village," and so forth). In perhaps the most disturbing iteration, an "Old Plantation" was populated with African-Americans portraying themselves as slaves. And, before the era of the great expositions, all manner of smaller shows, many of just a single individual, can be traced back to Elizabethan times.

Altick's subject is London, and it's the people displayed there that are at the center of his chapter. The cause célèbre of these was Sarah Baartman, who arrived in London in 1810 and was exhibited at the Egyptian Hall. Given the sobriquet the "Hottentot Venus," her appearance was both enormously popular but also controversial, even at the time. Similar exhibits of Africans displayed as "primitives" appeared throughout the Victorian era; one of them, a group of "Zulu Kafirs" shown at Hyde-Park Corner, is among the shows referenced by Dickens in his "The Noble Savage."

The other show that caught Dickens's attention was that of George Catlin who, in his efforts to sell his paintings of native American "Indians," engaged the services of a troupe of Ojibway who had been in England for an unrelated exhibition. He brought them to the Egyptian Hall, where they performed some of their native dances and rituals, while Catlin and his assistant answered questions from the audience. This was, in a way, a step up from Catlin's earlier events, which featured tableuax vivants of white people in "redface" makeup and feathered headbands.

These types of exhibits gradually declined in number and popularity in the early twentieth century, as many nations began to ban the exploitation of their indigenous people for such purposes, Nancy Columbia, the star of her "Eskimo" troupe, enjoyed a brief career in Hollywood films, including 1911's "The Way of the Eskimo," which credited her as its screenwriter. She left show business in 1920, and lived quietly in Santa Monica, where she died in 1959.

Of the Eidophusikon, and other simulacra

The original Eidophusikon

When it comes to Victorian virtual reality, the Panorama by no means had a monopoly on the concept. For centuries, there lived the dream that one could, by means of some mechanical apparatus or another, perfectly simulate the motion and appearance of life and the world around us. The eighteenth century was fixated on automata, ranging from mechanical musicians to a remarkable "digesting duck" which not only ate food, but excreted it out its other end! As the nineteenth century dawned, the scope of such simulacra both expanded and contracted -- expanding into the world of landscapes and natural phenomena, and yet shrinking in scale such that individual people, in some instances, were no larger than ants.

First and foremost among these new wonders was the Eidophusikon -- invented by the actor David Garrick and the artist Philip James de Loutherbourg. Miniature theatres were already known, and would have been familiar to Garrick; what this new spectacle added was a realistic set of changes, whether of light, clouds, or weather; within its confines, the sun rose and set, the moon appeared behind clouds, storms blew across tiny harbors, and volcanoes erupted with fire and smoke. Its exact mechanism is no longer known, but it has been reconstructed to a greater or lesser degree several times. The first, in 2004, made use of a full-sized theatre, and thus was really only a tribute of sorts; the second time, at the Yale Center for British Art in 2005, was the first done to scale. Since then, a third version has been built, and is now a permanent part of the New National Museum in Monaco. Yet another has recently been tried, using 3D computer modeling, in Sydney, Australia -- this video illustrates some of the challenges involved, and re-creates one of the original scenes with remarable exactitude.

The Eidophusikon debuted in 1781, and despite one brief revival, survived only as a sort of rumor. Nevertheless, it inspired a wide variety of Victorian exhibitions, most prominently an apparatus known as a "Theatre of Arts." Its inventor, one J.F. Thiodon, had hit upon the expedient of using leather belts that were in constant motion; when a belt was raised into position below the stage, mechanical figures -- men, horses, ships, and so forth -- were "actuated," the friction with the belt causing them to move about. Thus, while the individual figures might not be thought "realistic," their collective motion -- armies marching in file, horses galloping along a road, trees shaking in the wind -- gave such a lifelike appearance that audiences were mechanically swept off their feet. No less a showman than P.T. Barnum aquired one of these theatres, and displayed it to great effect at his American Museum in New York. They were not only captivating, but versatile -- Barnum's "Siege of Sebastopol" (1854) could readily, by re-painting its soldiers, be made to serve as the "Attack on Fort Sumter" (1861) -- indeed, this was just what was done (the change was made right here in Providence, by a company that specialized in re-purposing panoramas and mechanical amusements).  This, after all, was an age of economy; the labor represented by the mechanical apparatus was, like a panorama's canvas, more valuable than the paint which represented its subject. There was no need, within these "theatres," to aspire to the status of fine art; they comfortably rested between entertainment and education, and proved enormously durable.

Similar mechanical theatres of this sort far outlived Mr. Thiodon, and appeared around the world; one of them, the "Grand Théâtre Méchanique" of Moreiux survives to this day; here you can see the figures in detail, with animated GIFS showing them in motion. With the mechanism hidden just below the bottom edge of the stage, it's no wonder that audiences gasped in wonder, as General Menshikov -- or was that Major Anderson? -- bravely tried to hold on despite heavy losses among their mechanized followers.

As Altick notes, these shows were coeval with lantern and panorama entertainments, and quite often a single exhibition would combine elements of all of them. There was the additional element of what was then called "The Chinese Shades," but we would see as a "shadow play" -- the Australian artist Richard Bradshaw still plies the same trade today. So many were the various apparati of the time, and so ambiguous the words on the handbills, that Erkki Huktamo (author of Illusions in Motion) often notes that it's probaby impossible to know exactly what some of them consisted of. All we can be sure of, is that the audiences came expecting a spectacle of some sort, and seem to have gone home happy.

Arctic Spectacles

Life reflects art reflects life -- at least sometimes -- and this is never more so than with the Victorian fascination with places that were the hardest to actually visit, such as the Arctic. Referred to in many texts of the day as "those almost unseen regions," they were as exotic in their time as images of the Moon or Mars are to us today. And yet, perhaps paradoxically, since so few knew what they looked like, they were liable to all sorts of fanciful picturings; who, after all, would be able to compare any of them to their own actual experience?

Here art played a pivotal role, especially in the era before the invention of photography, but also after. The Panorama catch phrase -- "painted from sketches made upon the spot" -- put a premium on the works of explorer-artists such a Samuel Gurney Cresswell, whose image of HMS Investigator heaved up by the ice has become so iconic that, even today, it's a go-to for the cover of any book on an Arctic subject. Later in the century, fine art painters decided that they, too, must learn to paint icebergs from life; one of them, Frederic Edwin Church, bought passage on a ship to Labrador, while others, such as Willam Bradford, chartered their own ships in order to be able to sail yet further north.

And sometimes, despite the limitations of the pre-photographic world, the Victorian's notion of life in the Arctic turns out to be more real than one might imagine. Before I headed north this year, friends of mine gave me a colored print depicting a polar bear attacking a seal; the print came from a nineteenth-century edition of Buffon's Natural History, General and Particular. Imagine the strange shock of recognition when, a week or so into my Arctic sojourn, I beheld almost the very same scene upon the ice. I have only one criticism of the artist who depicted this scene for Buffon -- there is not enough blood.

There were other "unseen" worlds that drew the Victorian gaze in their direction, of course. Microscopes revealed the teeming life in a "Drop of London Water," while one of the earliest films in history depicted the microscopic life within a Stilton cheese, which is quite literally teeming with cheese mites (the film led to a lawsuit from the London Cheese Council). And, just as it is for us, the vast range of distant planets and outer space was a great draw for Victorian spectators; many of these images drew from the Moon as imagined in Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon (1865). And yet it was the earthbound vision of the Arctic, with massive icebergs so monumental that one critic compared the one in Frederic Church's "Icebergs" (1861) to "the great white throne of the Apocaypse." The peoples of the Arctic also drew interest, not only in panoramas, dioramas, and lantern slides, but also in the form of human exhibitions at world's fairs and carnivals, where fairgoers could gawk at actual "Esquimaux" people (whom today we know as Inuit).

So read the chapters of my book Arctic Spectacles (linked near the top of the liks list at right), and do a quick self-check: when you think of the Arctic, what images come unbeckoned to your mind? Might some of these, indeed, be similar to those conjured up by your great-great-grandparents? Do these Victorian versions of the north still cast their shadow upon today -- and if so, what does that tell us about our own ways of seeing?

The Panorama

Our collective appetite for visual spectacles has a history which long predates the projections of the earliest film, back to the early nineteenth century, when crowds lined up across Europe and America to see massive depictions of spectacular disasters, ranging from the Battle of Waterloo to the Great Earthquake of Lisbon to the burning of Sebastapol. If our own time can be characterized, as it was by Guy Debord, as that of the 'Society of the Spectacle,' then its timeline must be extended to include the Panorama, where the very sense of society self-seen in the mirror of media was born, and whose technology was as characteristic of its age as the cinema is of the twentieth century.

For the "panorama" was not found, but invented, and patented as well, by Robert Barker in 1794. The technical challenge was to create a painting on a curved surface that looked like the view from a great distance, and in every direction. Some geometrical calculations were involved to ensure that the landscape did not seem distorted, a problem Barker was said to have solved by looking at the lines made on the floor of his prison cell by the grid of bars. A small one was first exhibited in Edinburgh, to which Barker invited the eminent authority Sir Joshua Reynolds. There was a feeling, at that time, that things which merely mimicked reality did not count as art -- Barker wanted very much to have his paintings considered as art -- a desire to which Sir Joshua gave his seal of approval. A purpose-built structure -- which still stands (see this GoogleEarth view) -- was erected in London's Leicester-square, and the first Panorama, of 'London from the Roof of the Albion Mills,' was unveiled. This was soon followed by a view of the British fleet at Spithead, was unveiled. The effect was said to be so realistic that it made Queen Charlotte seasick.

The phenomenon spread all around the world; by the mid-nineteenth century there was hardly a major city in Europe or America without at least one Panorama rotunda; many had several. Here in the United States, there were dozens, beginning with Vanderlyn's Panorama of the Palace and Gardens of Versailles (the building is long gone, but the painting survives at New York's Metropolitan Museum), the recently-restored Gettysburg Cyclorama in Gettysburg, and the Cyclorama of the Burning of Atlanta in Atlanta (A "Cyclorama" is a Panorama with the addition of false scenery and other special effects). Boston had one too -- a so-called "Cyclorama" of the Civil War -- but its case is the opposite of Vanderlyn's; the painting is gone but the building still stands.

Some scholars insist and perhaps rightly so, that one should not seek to understand the Panorama primarily as the predecessor of the cinema. They like to cite Theodor Adorno's maxim that "nothing is more detrimental to a theoretical understanding of modern art than attempts to reduce it to similarities with what went before." Yet the kind of history at stake in the Panorama seems not to be the "progressive" history of which Adorno was so suspect, but rather a kind of Borgesian history, in which the present casts its shadow upon the past, and artists 'invent their precursors.' And now, as the "Panorama" option on the iPhone enables everyone to create all-encompassing views, we can look back to the original London Panorama as a shadow of ourselves, one which we should be perfectly free to regard as an early Victorian version of 'virtual reality.'