Parade Grounds.
The brief and wondrous life of the Pittsburgh Panorama.
Paul Philippoteaux and others, Gettysburg Cyclorama, c. 1886.
In 1885, one of America’s most exciting young painters was returning from Europe, a head full of knowledge and a crate full of paintings. John Henry Twachtman had left his native Cincinnati a promising prospect but was returning with the latest innovations in Parisian painting and a body of work that spoke for itself. By a stroke of luck, Twachtman wasn’t aboard the S.S. Oregon, the ship that carried all his worldly belongings: the Oregon sank off the coast of Fire Island. Broke and empty-handed, Twachtman leveraged his association with his French teachers1 to get a job doing “hackwork”2 on a big project in a group studio in Chicago. The massive painting required a team of eight painters,3 and, owing to Twachtman’s “rapid stroke and subtle color sense,” Twachtman was put on cloud duty. The “most innovative American Impressionist” was hired to paint the sky blue.4
The project wasn’t a mural exactly; it was a very different kind of public spectacle—a very American one. This was a cyclorama—a vast painting surrounding the audience in a circle—and its subject was the battlefield of Gettysburg.
Cycloramas and panoramas were hugely popular in mid-nineteenth-century America. You paid admission to the show, took a seat, and were treated to music and narration, your gaze directed to various spots on the relentless canvas around you. Some variants had dummies and actors and spotlights; others scrolled the landscape past you with mechanical rollers. But a commonality to all was the puzzling choice of subject matter. “John Vanderlyn painted the most stylistically accomplished cyclorama of the early nineteenth century, the Palace and Gardens of Versailles,” only to be exceeded by 1829’s The South Bank of the Thames, toured on “rural circuits” across America. Samuel Hudson gave Pittsburgh “12,000 feet of the Hudson River” in 1848; 1850 presented three miles of canvas to give middle Americans “the Monumental GRANDEUR of the MISSISSIPPI VALLEY.”5 The Battlefields of Gettysburg and Shiloh, produced in Chicago, were late entrants in the cyclorama/panorama fad, but manifested the same constitution—bringing the place to the people, now “like measles, a possibility anywhere.”6
These are certainly romantic sites—sites of danger, death, but also of beauty and glory, amply recorded in prose and poetry. They present well in the pages of novels and gazetteers, but as immersive experiences? Not only are they boring subjects, they are also popularly available to the target audience. If you want to see the Mississippi River, there’s twenty four hundred miles of it; statistically speaking, most Americans had easy access to the thing itself.
II. Like Measles.
Last week’s “Why Do We Portrait?” considered portraiture as a broadcast medium—defined by an asymmetry of access, the feeling you’re with the person who in turn is relieved of the feeling that they’re with you—and that same asymmetry drives landscape as a discrete mode. Landscape doesn’t transmit the land itself, it transmits a sense of the land to people it is not required to accommodate.
Landscape differs from scenic design—painting the backdrop to film and stage—but they have emptiness in common. Scenic backdrops must operate as a setting for drama—people must be in front of them, not in them. For landscape to operate its asymmetry, it too must eliminate all evanescent features, starting with people and their traces. Ruins, wrecks, and the odd Old Mill can stay in the picture—but anything more transient than a cow has to be blended in with muddy riverbank or painted out entirely.
There are occasional scenes in some of the panoramas—vignettes nestled into the landscape, but these vignettes serve to underscore exactly the problem of landscape painting for an increasingly industrial nation. While Americans came to regard the rising skylines of its cities in terms of landscape,7 the city was nonetheless too dynamic to capture with the old form. There’s no Cyclorama of the Brooklyn Bridge, as Rem Koolhaas observed in Delirious New York:
“The definitive Manhattan can only be realized as a model . . . Manhattan itself is doomed to remain an imperfect approximation of its theoretical model . . . which presents Manhattan as a city not of matter but of light, traveling along the cosmic curve of relativity.”8
That is, New World architecture is just too disposable to merit the monumentalization of landscape. (To accommodate both its photogenic-ness and its dynamism, a new form in a new medium was required, disclosing the limits of landscape.)
Karl Kusserow, in his Nature’s Nation, has highlighted that the emptiness of landscape is itself artificial, and weaponized. A broad empty vision of the American West, shorn of the millions of people who lived there before colonization by European settlers, can function as a welcome mat to those Europeans colonizers. This is exactly what happened in the wake of Western adventurer-artists Thomas Moran and Albert Bierstadt; their trail of canvases presaged western expansion.
But beyond shearing out the evanescent, a metaphysical criterion is at work in landscape as well. Central Park makes an excellent example: Frederick Law Olmsted made Central Park—the park itself is the work, Olmsted its author; it is therefore fitting subject for elegies and postcards, but not for landscape proper.9
That pushes painters into a surprising cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, the philosophy of landscape demands fealty to the hard facts of reality—whether the work of the divine creator (as in Frederic Church’s view) or to the abstract idea of Nature (in Alexander von Humboldt’s); on the other, the remit to treat landscape—the art form—as a plastic medium.
From the earliest days of landscape in America, its practitioners talked a big game about the former, and routinely engaged in the latter. Thomas Cole rendered imaginary vistas without remark; his protégé, Frederic Church, gave us the greatest landscape spectacle of all with The Heart of the Andes. People lined up to see it by the thousands; all paid a quarter to peep, many taking up binoculars to get a better view of the imaginary place, so realistically rendered. It wasn’t a real place, but that didn’t detract from its realism.
If landscape offers the invitation to the place, that invitation is consummated in front of the painting itself. The painting brings Gettysburg to you, and in so doing, roots you to your spot. Thousands of people trooped to see Church’s Heart of the Andes; perhaps a small handful followed up by visiting the Andes. That asymmetry of access—the broadcast-ability—brings the point of contact to you, here, standing in front of the painting. It reassures with a concreteness, a truthiness, and a permanence—and completes the operation on your imagination right there. And so while these paintings are inspiring, it is dominantly a journey of the mind. The battlefield scrolls by; it pushes you along the river, but also deeper into your seat. The world is, if not as it should be, as it really is.
III. Salvage.
When The Battlefield of Gettysburg opened in Pittsburgh on June 14 of 1887, it was an instant success, quickly recouping the $200,000 it cost to mount. Twachtman recovered from this low point in his career, filling in the blue sky over Gettysburg. He was paid very well for the work; he resettled permanently in Cos Cobb, Connecticut, and his career took off in earnest. By the end of the year, salvage crews recovered the wreck of the S.S. Oregon from the Atlantic Ocean—many of Twachtman’s paintings, unsaleably damp, were nonetheless preserved.
But panoramas are studies in diminishing returns: they exhaust their own spectacle nearly instantly. As transmitters of place, they succeed for a moment before going bust. As monuments they hardly compare with literature’s power to stick in the collective mind. Pittsburghers simply stopped going to see the show after a few months—one of the reasons cycloramas and panoramas often toured, like the circus. But for a few examples, they have all long since been lost.
Thanks for reading.
Jonathan
Jonathan@JonathanMillerSpies.com
Namely Jules Lefebvre at the Académie Julian.
Janet Marstine, “Panoramas and the Cyclorama in Pittsburgh: The Beginning and the End of a Unique Entertainment Genre,” The Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine, vol. 69, no. 1, Jan. 1986, p. 34.
Two biographies of Twachtman mention that Arthur B. Davies worked alongside Twachtman on the panorama, but Davies evades mention in Marstine’s study.
These characterizations from Janet Marstine’s “Panoramas and the Cyclorama in Pittsburgh: The Beginning and the End of a Unique Entertainment Genre,” The Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine, vol. 69, no. 1, Jan. 1986, pp. 21-36.
Per handbill advertisement in the collection of the Saint Louis Art Museum, available here. The Mississippi River was the subject of more than one panorama; apparently Banvard’s Geographical Panorama of the Mississippi River crammed 1,200 miles of river into three miles of canvas.
Marstine, p. 24.
Eg.: George Bellow’s masterpiece of tenement life is called Cliff Dwellers.
Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York, 1978, p. 666.
Rem Koolhaas derisively quotes Le Corbusier’s observation about the power of parks to make cities human: “A Battle of Giants? No! The miracle of trees and parks reaffirms the human scale . . .” The Radiant City, as quoted in Delirious New York, 1978, p. 596.