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Chapter Four  Word, Image, and National Geography Invented at the end of the eighteenth century, panoramas—large illusionistic paintings designed to make the viewer feel transported to the place portrayed—were extraordinarily popular for much of the nineteenth century . Circular panoramas, in which viewers would look at 360-degree paintings from a viewing platform, were more popular in Europe. In the United States, on the other hand, long, moving panoramas that were unrolled before seated viewers proved more successful. This has partly to do with material conditions. The large metropolitan cities of Europe were better able to accommodate the construction of permanent panorama buildings, while the more diffuse population of the United States made the portable moving panoramas far more pro‹table in that country. But Stephan Oettermann has suggested that other factors came into play as well. “For Europeans,” he argues, “the 360-degree vista of the panorama re›ected . . . curiosity [about the world around them] and represented an enormous expansion of perspective. Americans on the other hand, were dealing with dimensions in their own country that could not be grasped or conquered simply by climbing to an elevated point and surveying the horizon . The circular painting was visually inadequate to the situation in which they found themselves.”1 This visual inadequacy of the circular panorama, he suggests, partly accounts for the popularity of moving panoramas in a nation that, like the panoramas themselves, during the antebellum period seemed to be continually unrolling to include more territory. The question of nationality and panoramic form is one we will return to. The key point for now is that the new form of public entertainment was a hit on both sides of the Atlantic, in part because it helped European and American audiences negotiate their expanding geographical horizons.2 64 This new visual technology—in many ways a precursor of cinema—provided European and American viewers with two kinds of vicarious visual experience. Panoramas of distant European cities like Florence, Athens, and Berlin enabled middle-class viewers to take a tamer, cheaper version of the grand tour once reserved for the wealthy. Panoramas of places like Bombay, Calcutta, California, Cuba, and the Sandwich Islands, on the other hand, went hand in hand with the growing power of the British Empire and with American expansion. Panoramas, in other words, were among what Edward Said has called the “cultural formations” within which “the processes of imperialism” were consolidated.3 The massive paintings of these locales at the edges of empires allowed viewers, just for one evening—and without ever leaving home—to see what the explorers and adventurers who made Western empire-building possible had seen. In effect, panoramas enabled those viewers to become vicariously what Mary Louise Pratt has identi‹ed as “seeing man, . . . he whose imperial eyes look out and possess”—a central ‹gure in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travel writing.4 The heyday of the panorama form in the United States was the 1840s and 1850s, when John Banvard and his rivals Professor Risley and J. R. Smith made grand transatlantic successes of their panoramas of the Mississippi, each claiming to be more accurate and, above all, bigger than the other. The panorama viewing experiences of Philadelphia art collector Joseph Sill provide some evidence for how sophisticated Americans saw the popular entertainments. In his diary, Sill records a second visit to Burford’s Panorama of Rome . . . and the Bay of Islands, painted in 1837, which he “enjoyed even still more highly” than the ‹rst. Sill marvels at the correctness of the paintings, notes that “[a]s works of Art they are admirable,” and sums up by declaring “the illusion is perfect and you gain such information in a few minutes, as it would be impossible to receive by a whole life of reading.” His reviews of Banvard’s and Smith’s Mississippi panoramas are equally enthusiastic, and of Smith’s he notes approvingly that “it has drawn a horde of visitors.” In an 1850 commentary on Smith’s Panorama of California , Mexico, Panama &c., Sill observes of the country that his own nation had recently defeated, “Some of the Scenes, by the Overland Route thro’ Mexico were beautiful and it would be a pleasure, were it safe and comfortable , to make a Journey through it.” “The children,” he adds, “received from the Panorama a lesson on Geography which they shall probably never forget.”5 By the 1860s Artemus Ward, arguably America’s ‹rst stand-up comic, was burlesquing the form. Artemus...

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