Art: Panorama Show

On Saturday afternoons in 1859 Manhattanites trooped to Hope Chapel at Broadway and Eighth Street. At the door “scholars” paid 6¢, all others 15¢. Inside they climbed a dark stairway to a big covered platform. Hidden gas lamps above lit a circle of landscapes 15 ft. high. Soon a lecturer appeared and talked steadily through the audience’s vicarious “Tour Through Italy.” The canvas cylinder moved slowly, exposing seriatim the start in Boston Harbor, the rolling Atlantic, several hundred views of Italy and finally the return home to New York Harbor.

In this last bright brown-&-blue-grey picture they saw themselves as they had looked twelve years before, trooping into famed Castle Garden, rowing out to the late Phineas Taylor Barnum’s famed Chinese junk Keying which Barnum had built in Hoboken, claimed he had had towed clear from China. On the right a full load of 100 Irish immigrants and baggage, including the box of one “Pat Murfy. For Ameriky,” debarked from a three-masted British ship. In this, as in all his work, able Painter Samuel B. Waugh had mixed a slapdash effect with some realism.

Last week the “panorama show,” the 19th Century’s forerunner of cinema, long forgotten, was news again. All but one of the several hundred paintings that Manhattanites goggled at in 1859 had vanished. Sole known survivor was the view of New York Harbor. Last week it came to view again on the walls of the Museum of the City of New York, the gift of Mrs. Robert Malcolm Littlejohn, Manhattan socialite.

Manhattan’s Daily Advertiser advertised the U. S.’s first panorama show (Jerusalem) in 1790, “at Lawrence Hyer’s Tavern, between the Gaol and the Tea Water Pump; the sight is most brilliant by candlelight.” The U. S. panorama fad reached its peak in the 1850’s, faded fast.

Not to be confused with the Panorama is the Cyclorama, a single long painting in which one place or event merges into the next. Examples: the famed Pantheon of the War (402 ft. by 43 ft.) done by aged & infirm French painters, now in Chicago (see above); Battle of Gettysburg (404 ft. by 72 ft.), by Paul Philippoteoux, also in Chicago.