Robert Barker’s ‘Panorama’ : A Room with a View
In 1787, the painter Robert Barker opened an exhibition in Edinburgh which was to have a major impact on the nineteenth- and twentieth-century entertainment industries. It featured a panoramic view of the city of Edinburgh painted around the inner wall of a rotunda which, viewed from the center of the room, gave the spectator the illusion of reality.
During the nineteenth century, panoramas and related forms of visual illusionism–dioramas, moving panoramas, peep-shows–became an early form of mass entertainment in European and American cities.
Cross section of Robert Barker’s Panorama, Leicester Square, London, 1789
The panoramic view itself was far from new. Panoramas are at least as old as the Bayeux Tapestry, and artists had been painting bird’s-eye views of cities long before the invention of manned flight made them a reality. What was new was the idea of putting the painting into a circular room and attempting to deceive the eye into believing that it was looking not at a painting, but reality itself. The history of panoramas is closely interwoven with that of photography throughout the nineteenth century, each playing an important part in the other’s development.
I’ve heard about these panoramas…how many of these traveling exhibits still exist somewhere?
Sadly, there are very few of these enormous paintings left, and none from the first flowering of the art in the early nineteenth century. There is a late nineteenth century panorama of the Battle of Waterloo still open to the public, near the battlefield in Belgium. There is another in The Hague, called the Panorama Mesdag, which shows the beaches near village of Scheveningen, which was painted by Mesdag in the 1880s.
In order to obtain a return on the great investment of painting them, most of these huge canvases were carted from town to town, continually rolled and unrolled for each exhibit until they simply wore out.
PS – The image above is mis-dated. Barker did not open his purpose-built panorama building in Leicester Square until 1793. In 1789, he rented rooms at No. 28, The Haymarket to display his first panorama, of the City of Edinburgh.