A Picture of Light: Daguerre's Diorama

A surviving Diorama Scene (in the "night"view)

We've looked at static forms of Victorian virtual reality, such as the great-circle Panorama, and we've looked at movement both mechanical (the Eidophusikon) and scrolling (the moving panorama). But riddle me this: what Victorian medium involved change over time, despite it having no "motion" at all?

The answer is Daguerre's "Diorama," for which he was famous many years before he became known as one of the inventors of photography. In the Diorama, a scene changed slowly, unutterably slowly, from night to day, from fall to winter, from sunlight to moonlight; its subtlety, along with its resemblance to natural changes of light and color, was its attraction. The changes were obtained by varied means: some of the surface of the canvas was prepared without gesso or sizing, making it translucent; on the opposite side of the canvas, there were other colors revealed only when illuminated. Behind stage, lamps, colored filters, and other apparati invisible to the viewers was brought into play to heighten these effects.

Until recently, we believed that only one original Diorama canvas had survived (see above); it had been hanging in a church for more than a century, its colors muted by a coat of shellac, until restored with help from the Getty Trust. Now, however, a second Diorama, attributed to Daguerre and Bouton (his partner in the business); you can watch some of the effects in this video posted by the gallery.  And, as with panoramas, there was been some interest in re-creating the illusion, most of them using digital technology. The original Diorama building in Regent's Park in London, though long gutted, is still visible in aerial shots; one can see the two theatres, with the circle in the middle which housed the rotating platform that turned from one view to the next (this view is from Google Earth). The original building in Paris is long gone, and there was even an affiliated establishment right near us in Boston, though its exact location is unclear. The Diorama has also attracted great interest among art historians, such as Dore Bowen and Stephen Pinson; Pinson's 2012 book, Speculating Daguerre, argues that the Diorama was as significant an invention as photography.