The first panoramas
Subtitle: visions of British imperialism
By: Denise Blake Oleksijczuk
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press; Univ Of Minnesota Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Minneapolis
Language: eng
Number of pages: 264
ISBN-13: 9780816648603; 9780816648610
Subjects: Panoramas; HISTORY / Europe / Great Britain; Art exhibition audiences; Criticism and interpretation; ART / History / Romanticism
Description: "The First Panoramas is a cultural history of the first three decades of the panorama, a three-hundred-sixty-degree visual medium patented by the artist Robert Barker in Britain in 1787. A towering two-story architectural construction inside which spectators gazed on a 10,000-square-foot painting, Barker's new technology was designed to create an impression of total verisimilitude for the observer.  In the beautifully illustrated The First Panoramas, Denise Blake Oleksijczuk demonstrates the complexity of the panoramas' history and cultural impact, exploring specific exhibits: View of Edinburgh and the Adjacent Country from the Calton Hill (1788), View of London from the Roof of the Albion Mill (1791), View of the Grand Fleet Moored at Spithead (1793), and the two different versions of View of Constantinople (1801). In addition to the art itself, she examines the panoramas' intriguing descriptive keys--single-sheet diagrams that directed spectators to important sites in the representation, which evolved over time to give the observer greater perceptual control over the view.  Using the surviving evidence, much of it never published before, on the early exhibitions of these massive installations, Oleksijczuk reconstructs the relationships between specific paintings, their accompanying printed guides, and the collective experiences of different audiences. She argues that by transporting its spectators to increasingly distant locations, first in the city and country and then in the world beyond Britain's borders, the panorama created a spatial and temporal disjunction between "here" and "there" that helped to forge new national and social identities"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note: Acknowledgments; title: Introduction: Robert and Henry Aston Barker's Panorama; title: 1. Nature at a Glance; title: 2. Selling the Panorama to London; title: 3. The King and Queen Visit the Panorama; title: 4. The Views of Constantinople; title: 5. The Keys to Panoramas; title: Appendix; title: Notes; title: Bibliography; title: Index.