A precursor of the silver screen - panoramas

Magazine Antiques, Feb, 1999 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

In the United States in the mid-nineteenth century the panorama merged art and popular entertainment to wide acclaim. Exhibitions of panoramas were highly popular events to which the public bought tickets. Once inside, the spectators watched as an enormous scroll-like narrative painting was gradually unfurled from one spool and wound onto another. Often these showings were accompanied by narration, music, or sermons, which considerably heightened the audience's experience. Because panoramas were hundreds of feet long, only a handful have survived. However, we know much about them because, like films today, they were reviewed by critics and promoted in newspapers and periodicals.

In 1996 Tom Hardiman, the curator of the York Institute Museum in Saco, Maine, uncovered two enormous sections of what turned out to be the only extant version of Pilgrim's Progress, a panorama completed in 1851 and stored at the York Institute for a century. The panorama is eight feet tall. One of the surviving sections is about five hundred feet long and the other nearly four hundred feet long. The latter has now been restored at the Williamstown Art Conservation Center in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and divided into two pieces, which will be on view at the Montclair Art Museum in Montclair, New Jersey, from February 2 until May 2. The traveling exhibition is entitled The Moving Panorama of "Pilgrim's Progress." Future showings will be listed in Calendar.

Panoramas were painted on muslin, and metal beads attached at top and bottom fitted into tracks so that the picture remained taut. Hand-turned cranks were used to unroll and reroll the panorama over the course of some two hours. The first panorama of Pilgrim's Progress, painted in 1850, proved to be so financially and critically successful that this second version was painted.

What survives are more than forty scenes, ranging from twelve to thirty feet wide. They depict monumental figures in landscape settings as described in the classic tale Pilgrim's Progress written by John Bunyan and published in two parts in 1678 and 1684. The narrative, laden with religious overtones, follows the protagonist Christian, and later his wife Christiana and their children, as they progress toward the Celestial City. Still in print in the mid-nineteenth century, the tale enjoyed a revival and was familiar to a large portion of the population.

This panorama is especially fascinating in that it was executed by academically trained painters associated with the prestigious National Academy of Design in New York City - Joseph Kyle and Jacob Dallas. Some of the designs on which the painted scenes are based are attributed to Frederic Edwin Church, Jasper F. Cropsey, and Daniel Huntington. Kyle had worked on the first version, and, taking his cue from critics of the first attempt, he made appropriate emendations to the second. The most significant change was clearer divisions between one scene and the next so that the narrative was less confusing.

The exhibition will include related materials such as original illustrated editions of Pilgrim's Progress, broadsides issued to promote the panorama as it toured the country, the catalogue that accompanied the tour, and newspaper reviews. Two drawings and one painting that relate to the panorama are also on view.

The catalogue of the exhibition contains essays by Tom Hardiman, and Kevin J. Avery. It is available from the Montclair Art Museum by telephoning 973-746-5555, extension 237, or by faxing 973-746-9118.