Panoramics & Cycloramas

Before there was digital "Virtual Reality" , there was painted virtual reality.  

Panoramas.   

The Irish artist Robert Barker patented this  new art form in 1787: a circular painting that surrounded the viewer.  Naming it a "Panorama", from the Greek words "to see", and "all", he opened his first Panorama of Edinburgh in a specially built rotunda in Leicester Square in 1791. 

Section of the Rotunda, Leicester Square, in which is exhibited the Panorama, 1801. 

Visitors entered the circular or 16-sided building, walked through a dimly lit corridor, and climbed a spiral staircase to enter upon a circular viewing platform, where they viewed immense oil paintings depicting far away lands or events.

The Panoramic was extremely popular amongst the middle and lower classes, as it offered the illusion of traveling  to a completely different location, without the expense and inconvenience of actual travel.

Cross section of a panorama:

(A) Box office and entrance.

(B) Dark corridor and cylindrical center staircase.

(C) Observation platform.

(D) Viewer's field of vision.

(E) 360-degree circular canvas.

(F) Three-dimensional faux terrain elements.

(G) Trompe l'oeil elements painted directly onto canvas.

Panorama Mesdag, a 360-degree painted view of the beach and dunes at Scheveningen created in 1881,today can be seen at the Hague, in the Netherlands.

"Cycloramas were a very popular form of entertainment in the late 1800's, both in America and Europe. These massive, oil-on-canvas paintings were displayed in special auditoriums and enhanced with landscaped foregrounds sometimes featuring trees, grasses, fences and even life-sized figures. The result was a three-dimensional effect that surrounded viewers who stood on a central platform, literally placing them in the center of the great historic scene. Most cycloramas depicted dramatic events such as great battles, religious epics, or scenes from great works of literature. Hundreds were painted and exhibited in Europe and America during the 1800's..."

Experience The Heroic Live and Career of Garibaldi Panorama through an online video presentaton, here:

https://library.brown.edu/cds/garibaldi/panoramaHTML5/panorama_scroll.php

Bringing immersive paintings to small towns allowed the viewers to avoid “the innumerable miseries of travel, the insolence of public functionaries, the roguery of innkeepers, the visitations of banditti…and the rascality of the custom-house officers…” 

“Panoramas are among the happiest contrivances for saving time and expense in this age of contrivances. What cost a couple of hundred pounds and half a year half a century ago, now costs a shilling and a quarter of an hour.” 

In some larger cities, round buildings were constructed to house panoramas, but in most of our rural communities, traveling panorama shows came to the local opera houses.

During the 1880s, Gettysburg Panoramas were extremely popular.  Exhibits were frequently sponsored by veterans groups, and typically raised a good amount of money from the admission cost.  The Cyclorama at Gettysburg is one of those early Panoramas. 

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The Kaiser Panoramas

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In the early 1870s, the Kaiser Panorama was invented by August Furhrmann, in the German empire.  The large circular apparatus had 25 seats  and stereoscopes arranged around the outside.  

A hand tinted photographic Stereo Pair, from a Kaiser Panorama

Viewers would be shown 50 hand tinted photographic stereo pairs, in succession.  The effect was more of a slideshow, rather than a panorama, as no panoramic view was given.   Kaiser Panoramas were installed in 250 cities, and showed more than 1000 different photo series. Additional Kaiser Panoramas traveled, with some being installed at summer resorts just for  the season. " 

The Kaiser Panorama was built in the form of a cylinder  12.3 feet (3.75 m) in diameter and 7.9 feet (2.4 m) high, and was equipped with 25 stereoscopes and seats around the outside. Inside the cylinder was a "picture wheel" with 50 stere slides in a 170 x 85 mm format; a "precision drive mechanism"  rotated the wheel to place the 50 views, one after another, in the fields of view of the stereoscopes. The time required to view all 50 images was usually from 20 to 30 minutes, although the picture wheel could be speeded up when large numbers of customers."

Note - after the first world war, there was no longer an emperor.  The Kaiser Panorama was then renamed the World Panorama.

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Moving Panoramas

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 Moving Panoramas, also known as "Crankies"  became popular by 1900.  An early version of a travel film, they involved a large and very long strip of painted fabric being wound between two vertical cylinders and  then slowly unrolled before an audience.  A narrator would describe each scene as it appeared.  These Crankies were not true panoramas, bur rather "contiguous views of passing scenery, as if seen from a boat or a train window."

One example, exhibited at the the 1900 Paris world's fair, was the Trans-Siberian Express Moving Panorama. Visitors could experience the luxury on board in real railway carriages. 
"Behind the windows of four real carriages an ingenious mechanism provided the illusion of a moving train. Between a slowly rotating backdrop and a fast 'conveyor belt' with sand and stones two landscape paintings were moving at different speed, creating a parallax effect. Offering visitors a comprehensive experience, the Panorama Transsibérien included Russian and Chinese 'station restaurants'."  

This diagram describes the "Wagon-Lits" moving panorama with the shorter revolving scenery scrolls moving in front at different speeds, creating a parallax effect.
"At the bottom of the diagram are the three railroad cars (wagons). Above that is the revolving "sandy ground" which is on tread-mill-like machinery. This moved at 1,000 feet per minute. Next were low, cut-outs of bushes and schrubs moving at 400 feet per minute.  Behind that was more distant, taller scenery  moving at 130 feet per minute. The main moving panorama canvas moved the slowest at 16 feet per minute resulting in the illusion of depth, creating a parallax effect."
These train car panoramas them became popular in a variety of cities, and were also attractions at some amusement parks.  

A second, smaller, moving panorama at the 1900 World's Fair

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Toy Panoramas

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Toy panoramas were for a time popular Christmas gifts.  

At an International Panorama Conference in 2007, Ralph Hyde showed a slide of this American Panorama Toy, and described how children would put the poster on their bedroom door, then invite the family or friends to come view the show - with one child working the mechanism and another narrating.  The toys would often include manuscripts for the narrators, and even tickets for attendees.

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The Advent of "Moving Pictures" 

Movies

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On  October 19, 1878, Scientific American published a series of pictures depicting a horse in full gallop, along with instructions to view them through the zoetrope. The photos were taken by an English photographer, Eadweard Muybridge, to settle a bet between California businessman Leland Stanford and his colleagues. Stanford contended that at some point in a horse's stride, all four hooves were off the ground. He enlisted Muybridge to take photographs of the positions of a horse's hooves in rapid succession. Muybridge's 12 pictures showed that Stanford had won the bet.

Muybridge then created the zoogyroscope, in 1879 - a sequential photo projector.  At the same time, Etienne-Jules Mare fashioned a camera that could take 12 pictures per second of a moving object. The technique, called chronophotography, along with Muybridge's work, were the founding concepts for motion picture cameras and projectors.
New York City, in 1888,  Thomas Edison and his British assistant William Dickson set out to create a device that could record moving pictures.  Dickson unveiled a primitive motion picture camera, a "Kinetograph", in 1890.  In 1892 he announced the invention of the Kinestoscope, a machine that could project the moving images onto a screen. Edison initiated public film screenings in recently-opened "Kinetograph Parlors" in 1894.
By the early 1920s, "moving pictures" had so improved and perfected their technology that stereo images and panoramas were no longer in vogue, although that is not to say that they no longer existed.

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The Gettysburg Cyclorama

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In 1879,  Faul Philippoteaux, a professional cyclorama painter and artist from France, was hired to capture the Battle Of Gettysburg for the a special display in Chicago.
"Philippoteaux arrived in Gettysburg in 1882 armed with a sketchbook, pencils, pens, and a simple guide book to help him locate the site of the climactic charge. The artist spent several weeks on the battlefield, observing details of the terrain and making hundreds of sketches. To help him recall the landscape with accuracy, Philippoteaux hired a Gettysburg photographer to produce a series of panoramic photographs for his use. These images are some of the earliest detailed photographs of Cemetery Ridge, the Angle and the "High Water Mark", and the field of Pickett's Charge. Philippoteaux was also lucky enough to interview a number of veterans of the battle, who helped with suggestions on how to depict the chaos of battle."

Armed with a vast amount of information and ideas, Philippoteaux returned to his studio where he immediately set about laying out the great work. A team of assistants helped him sketch out every detail including soldiers, trees, crops, fences and stone walls, and then began applying tons of oil paint. The phenomenal work took over a year and one-half to complete. The "Cyclorama of the Battle of Gettysburg" opened to the public in Chicago in 1883, complete with a three-dimensional earthen foreground littered with the relics of battle, stone walls, shattered trees and broken fences. Visitors were awed by the painting's spectacular realism. Veterans of the battle, including General John Gibbon whose troops repulsed Pickett's Division on July 3, wrote of its splendor and realism."

In 1884, Philippoteaux was  again hired to paint a second version of the Battle, to be exhibited in Boston.  There the painting was exhibited for nearly twenty years before waning public interest caused the theater to be financially inoperable, and the Gettysburg Cyclorama shut its doors forever.  It was then purchased and moved to Gettysburg where it was restored and opened for public exhibition in time for the 1913 anniversary celebration of the battle.  In the 1940s, the cyclorama was purchased by the National Park Service, and after a massive restoration project, was opened in the newly constructed Gettysburg Park Visitor Center in 1962.  

The Battle of Gettysburg Panoramic, which traveled to Northumberland County in the 1830s and 1850s, was possibly a smaller version of the 377 feet long, 42 feet high and weighs 12.5 ton version that is today at Gettysburg. Or perhaps not.  There were at least 4 originals painted.  One is still in existence but in poor condition, in North Carolina.  Another  was cut up for use as tents by native Americans on a Shoshone Indian Reservation after the turn of the century.


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READ MORE
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From London to Paris: A newly discovered Moving Toy Panorama

One Kaiser Panorama continued to be used into the 1960s, in Alotting Germany.  In 1969, that unit was moved to the Munic Photo Museum.  Several other units still exist.  
A list of remaining panoramas from the 19th and 20th centuries, is kept by the International Panorama Council, and can be found here: https://panoramacouncil.org/en/what_we_do/resources/panoramas_and_related_art_forms_database/

• A Tale Of Two Cycloramas https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/a-tale-of-two-cycloramas.htm
• The Crankie Factory https://www.thecrankiefactory.com/
• https://www.magiclantern.org.uk/new-magic-lantern-journal/pdfs/4009779a.pdf
• The Panorama at the 1900 Expo https://retours.eu/en/22-panorama-transsiberien-expo-1900/
• Stereo World Magazine, Volume 28
• Altick, Richard. The Shows of London. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 1978.
• Boardman, Sue and Kathryn Porch. The Battle of Gettysburg Cyclorama, A History and Guide. Gettysburg, Pa: Thomas Publications, 2008.
• Brenneman, Chris and Sue Boardman. The Gettysburg Cyclorama, The Turning Point of the Civil War on Canvas. El Dorado Hills, Ca: Savas Beatie LLC, 2015.
• Holzer, Harold and Mark E. Neely, Jr. Mine Eyes Have Seen The Glory, The Civil War in Art. New York: Orion Books, 1993.
• Huhtamo, Erkki. Illusions in Motion. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2013.
• Oeterrman, Stephan. The Panorama, History of a Mass Medium. Translated by Deborah Lucas Schneider. New York: Zone Books, 1997.
• Olin, David J, “A Public-Private Partnership and International Collaboration Save an American Panorama Treasure,” in: The Panorama in the Old World and the New, edited by
• Gabriele Koller (Amberg, Germany: Buro Wilhelm. Verlag Koch-Schmidt-Wilhelm GbR, 2010) 120-125.
• Wilburn, Robert C, ”The Campaign to Preserve Gettysburg” in: The Panorama in the Old World and the New, edited by Gabriele Koller (Amberg, Germany: Buro Wilhelm. Verlag Koch-Schmidt-Wilhelm GbR, 2010) 126-128.