'Spectacles Within Doors': Panoramas of London in the 1790S

August 26, 2008 Time: 09:44am rom024.tex Markman Ellis ‘Spectacles within doors’: Panoramas of London in the 1790s ‘The interest of the panorama is in seeing the increasingly structured by this debate as a true city – the city indoors’. socially-stratified opposition. Wordsworth’s Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project response to the panorama in The Prelude, (1999), 532. although probably based on an experience of In his ramble around London in Book Seven of the exhibition, also reflects his engagement The Prelude (1805), Wordsworth’s poet with the written discourse of the panorama proposes to ‘let us view [...]theSpectacles/ media event. Within doors’. His key example is the Although the panorama dates from the panorama: late-eighteenth century, its modern historiography begins in the late 1960s, when a mimic sights that ape series of publications and research projects first The absolute presence of reality, subjected it to scholarly scrutiny. Pioneering Expressing, as in mirror, sea and land, work by Hubert Pragnell, Scott Wilcox, Richard 1 And what earth is, and what she has to show. Altick and Stephan Oettermann,2 culminated in The panorama is a large-scale landscape Ralph Hyde’s innovative Barbican Art Gallery painting depicting a circular 360 degree view exhibition and catalogue Panoramania! in exhibited under special conditions on the inside 1988.3 This archival work coincided with the surface of a dedicated cylindrical exhibition ‘rediscovery’, preservation and restoration of space. The panorama was invented in surviving panoramas, such as the Panorama Edinburgh in 1787, and, as this essay explores, Mesdag in The Hague, Netherlands.4 Although brought to completion in London in the period these early studies of the panorama emerged 1789–94. As an event, the panorama was not from outside the discipline of art history, they only a meticulously staged exhibition of a aroused considerable interest amongst painting, but also a carefully orchestrated practitioners of the New Art History in the media event comprising advertisements, patent 1980s, especially in the emergent discipline of grants, critical commentary and satire. In this ‘visual culture’.5 In this context, the panorama debate, the panorama was the subject of two has been seen as the paradigmatic point of critical discourses, one a language drawn from origin for the rise of mass entertainment, the art connoisseurship and the science of optics, prototype for a proliferating series of exhibition and the other, from the rhetoric of popular spectacles (cosmoramas, dioramas, cycloramas, spectacle. Although these two discourses cohere myrioramas, moving panoramas, around the same painted exhibition, they are phenakistiscopes) that inform the emergence of August 26, 2008 Time: 09:44am rom024.tex 134 Romanticism the new visual media in the nineteenth century applied for a patent for the panorama: his (daguerrotype, the photograph, the stereotype, ‘invention, called La nature à coup d’œil’,’ for and the cinema). A key early statement of the representing‘naturalobjects[...]orfancy’,was hypothesis was indicated in Walter Benjamin’s designed ‘so as to make observers, on whatever discussion of the panoramas of mid-nineteenth situation he may wish they should imagine century Paris in The Arcades Project, which themselves, feel as if really on the very spot’. though written between 1927 and 1940, was Written before any such painting had been unknown until first published in German in executed, the patent was somewhat evasive 1982 (and not translated into English until about the painted object it describes. It was 1999).6 The visual culture reading understands intended, he said, ‘by drawing and painting’ the panorama as a paradigm for modern mass entertainment both as a technical achievement to perfect an entire view of any country or (‘a form of reputedly stunning illusionism that situation, as it appears to an observer turning approximated both cinema’s visual field and quite round; to produce which effect, the time/space continuum’), but also as a watershed painter or drawer must fix his station, and event in social history (‘a popular medium delineate correctly and connectedly every enjoyed by mass audiences’).7 The general arc object which presents itself to his view as he of this argument – that panoramas lay the turns round, concluding his drawing by a groundwork for photography and cinema – has connection with where he began.11 been repeated and adumbrated by numerous scholars and theorists of visual culture.8 The patent further stipulated how the painting Nonetheless, the consistent focus of this was to be exhibited: it required a circular research is teleological, and as such, it obscures building lit from above, with the observer’s the recalcitrant historical complexity that movement restricted by an ‘enclosure’, so that attended the panorama’s emergence before its his or her view of both the upper and lower nineteenth century ascendancy. This essay, by edge of the painting was obscured by an contrast, focuses on the panorama in London in ‘interception’ (a low railing), and with entry to its first five years (1789–1794), and is the enclosure from below, so as not to ‘disturb’ structured around contemporary responses to the cylindrical perspectival plane. The patent the first three panorama paintings exhibited in itself was first published in a scientific journal the environs of Leicester-Square.9 The primary in 1796, after the media event described in this research materials, given that the panoramas essay. themselves have not survived, are Barker’s experimental view of Edinburgh contemporary reports of viewers’ experiences, from Calton Hill, executed in distemper, was printed critical remarks, visual orientation keys, first exhibited in temporary accommodation in commemorative prints, and the large number of Edinburgh in 1787. Barker commented in a printed advertisements in handbills and newspaper advertisement in 24 March 1788 newspapers written by diverse, sometimes that mere description ‘is inadequate to impress anonymous, critics, satirists and poets, a just idea of the performance, which, from the Wordsworth included.10 entire novelty of the thought, is not perfectly understood until seen.’12 The small scale of the painting (not much more than a half circle), Edinburgh in London and the inadequate exhibition spaces, did not On 19 June 1787 Robert Barker (1739–1806), show the idea to its full advantage. Having an Anglo-Irish painter working in Edinburgh, secured the patent, and the interest of Scottish August 26, 2008 Time: 09:44am rom024.tex ‘Spectacles within doors’: Panoramas of London in the 1790s 135 investors, Barker decided that the much larger certain ironic distance from Barker’s inflated audience of London offered him better claims. The first, printed in The World on opportunities for its profitable exploitation.13 26 March 1789 and reprinted in The Times a Barker’s removal to London was announced few days later, located the exhibition within to the public in spring 1789 by a series of debate on the theory of painting. newspaper notices and advertising handbills. The original undated handbill is addressed to When we reflect minutely on Mr. Barker’s ‘Connoisseurs’ and explains that the ‘celebrated Exhibition in the Haymarket, we are at a loss View of Edinburgh’ is exhibited in a building at to conjecture where improvement will end. No. 28, Hay-Market. To consider an art of the duration of ages, at all periods confined to the space of a limited There is no Deception of Glasses, or any angle, to which all the World were other whatever; the View being only a fair reconciled, now burst open upon us, as it Sketch, displaying at once a Circle of a very were the full effect of Nature, in her most extraordinary Extent, the same as if on the unbounded sweep, shews to what the human Spot; forming, perhaps, one of the most mind is capable of arriving at. Picturesque Views in Europe. The anonymous reviewer placed Barker’s The Idea is entirely New, and the Effect circular painting at the forefront of an historical produced by fair Perspective, a proper Point progress of painterly ‘improvement’, utilising of View, and unlimiting the Bounds of the here a key term of the Whig ideology of human Art of Painting. perfectibility. Where landscape painting had From early April, Barker used the text of the hitherto been constrained to a ‘limited angle’ handbill, almost verbatim, in advertisements in between 45 to 60 degrees, Barker’s 180-degree newspapers: first in The Diary, or Woodfall’s view of Edinburgh showed ‘the full effect of Register (9 April 1789), and subsequently, Nature, in her most unbounded sweep’. somewhat revised, in The Times (15 April Barker’s achievement, moreover, made a deep 1789).14 These advertisements establish much of impression on the observer, that the reviewer what is known about the quotidian articulated in the discourse of the sublime. arrangements of the spectacle: hours of The vast gratification with which this idea is business, cost of admission, the limited number pregnant, and which we hear that Artist of spectators admitted at one time, and early means to pursue, must give real cause for experiments with artificial lighting.The handbill joyful expectancy to every Amateur of an and advertisements also establish discursive Art which may now, nearly, be called parameters for the painting, distinguishing it Sublime; it seems surely not far from the from competing spectacles, and reinforcing the summit of perfection.15 painting’s novelty and grandeur, and its intellectual ambition (‘unlimiting the Bounds In gesturing to the sublime, the reviewer of the Art of Painting’). argued that the technical achievement of the The exhibition of the Edinburgh panorama panoramic view occasioned a kind of in London in 1789 created an immediate media imaginative revolution. discussion, even before the advertisements Further reviews of the painting in its first appeared. These first responses reflect both a month elaborated this critic’s observations.

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