Panorama

Panorama (Gr. pan, 'all,' and horama, 'a view'), a word coined by or for Barker in 1788 to mean 'a view all round.' The word is used loosely for all that the eye can see at once, or by a person's simply turning round, from an eminence; also for a series of pictures, such for example as what is called a 'panorama of the Rhine,' folded up in a kind of portfolio. The name is also given to a continuous series of painted pictures exhibited at one end of a room, and moved so as successively to pass into and out of the field of view by some mechanical arrangement. This when seen from a distance through an opening, and under a combination of direct and reflected light (as invented by Daguerre and Bouton), is called a diorama. But the word panorama properly belongs to what is now called, by way of distinction, cyclorama—a continuous painting on the interior of a cylindrical surface, the spectator standing in the centre. It is claimed that Breising of Danzig proposed such a plan. But Robert Barker (1739–1806), an Irish painter resident in Edinburgh, is entitled to the credit of having not merely conceived the method, but of having successfully carried it out on a large scale; his first ‘panorama’ being a view of Edinburgh, painted in water-colour on paper pasted on a cylinder of canvas 25 feet in diameter, and exhibited in Edinburgh in 1788. This he took to London in 1789; and in 1793 he erected a special building, one of the rooms of which admitted a circular picture 90 feet in diameter. Robert Fulton is said to have painted and exhibited shortly after this the first panorama seen in Paris. But on the Continent the panorama in this sense first became very popular after the Franco-German war of 1870–71. In various towns of Germany and in Paris panoramas of the war were exhibited in buildings specially built for the purpose; the Parisian one of the siege of Paris being enormously successful. In the United States also large panoramas have been exhibited, the subjects being battle-scenes from the civil war. A large panorama of the battle of Bannockburn, painted by Fleischer of Munich, was shown in a specially erected building in Glasgow in 1888; and one of the battle of Trafalgar, by the same artist, was a feature of the Edinburgh Exhibition of 1890. In the same year Niagara was brought on canvas to London, and in 1891 this was succeeded by a view of Jerusalem on the day of the Crucifixion. Georama is the name given to a delineation of the earth’s surface on the interior of a hollow sphere, the spectator being in the centre of the whole (see GLOBES).