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.