Panoramic Painting - Surviving Panoramas

Surviving Panoramas

Relatively few of these unwieldy ephemera survive; a rare surviving great-circle panorama is the Panorama Mesdag in a purpose-built museum in The Hague, showing the dunes of nearby Scheveningen. There is a panorama located at the battlefield of Waterloo, depicting the battle.

An exhibition "Panoramania" was held at the Barbican in the 1980s, with a catalog by Ralph Hyde. The Racławice Panorama, currently located in Wrocław, Poland, is a monumental (15 × 120 metre) panoramic painting depicting the Battle of Racławice, during the Kościuszko Uprising. A panorama of the Battle of Stalingrad is on display at Mamayev Kurgan. Among Franz Roubaud's great panoramas, those depicting the Siege of Sevastopol (1905) and Battle of Borodino (1911) survive, although the former was damaged during the Siege of Sevastopol (1942) and the latter was transferred to Poklonnaya Gora. The Pleven Panorama in Pleven, Bulgaria, depicts the events of the Siege of Plevna in 1877 on a 115×15-metre canvas with a 12-meter foreground.

Five large panoramas survive in North America: Jerusalem at the Moment of Christ's Death, at St. Anne, outside of Quebec City, the Gettysburg Cyclorama depicting Pickett's Charge during the Battle of Gettysburg in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, John Vanderlyn's Panorama of the Garden and Palace of Versailes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and the Cyclorama of the Battle of Atlanta in Atlanta, Georgia. A fifth panorama, also depicting the Battle of Gettysburg, was willed in 1996 to Wake Forest University in North Carolina; it is in poor condition and not on public display. It was purchased in 2007 by a group of North Carolina investors who hope to resell it to someone willing to restore it. Only pieces survive of a massive cyclorama depicting the Battle of Shiloh.

In the area of the Moving Panorama, there are somewhat more extant, though many are in poor repair and the conservation of such enormous paintings poses very expensive problems. The most notable rediscovered panorama in the United States was the Great Moving Panorama of Pilgrim's Progress, which was found in storage at the York Institute now the Saco Museum in Saco, Maine, by its former curator Tom Hardiman. It was found to incorporate designs by many of the leading painters of its day, including Jasper Francis Cropsey, Frederic Edwin Church, and Henry Courtney Selous (Selous was the in-house painter for the original Barker panorama in London for many years.)

The St. Louis Art Museum owns another moving panorama, which it is conserving in public during the summers of 2011 and 2012. "The Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley" — the only remaining of six known Mississippi River panorama paintings -- measures 90 inches wide by 348 feet long and was commissioned about 1850 by an eccentric amateur archaeologist named Montroville W. Dickeson. Judith H. Dobrzynski wrote about the restoration in an article in the Wall Street Journal dated June 27, 2012.

Another moving panorama was donated to the Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection at Brown University Library in 2005. Painted in Nottingham, England around 1860 by John James Story (d. 1900), it depicts the life and career of the great Italian patriot, Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–1882). The panorama stands about 4½ feet high and approximately 273 feet long, painted on both sides in watercolor. Numerous battles and other dramatic events in his life are depicted in 42 scenes, and the original narration written in ink survives.

The Arrival of the Hungarians, a vast cyclorama by Árpád Feszty et al., completed in 1894, is displayed at the Ópusztaszer National Historical Memorial Park in Hungary. It was made to commemorate the 1000th anniversary of the 895 conquest of the Carpathian Basin by the Hungarians.

The Cyclorama of Early Melbourne, by artist John Hennings in 1892, still survives albeit having suffered water damage during a fire. Painted from a panoramic sketch of Early Melbourne in 1842 by Samuel Jackson. It places the viewer on top of the partially constructed Scott's Church on Collins Street in the Melbourne CBD. Commissioned to celebrate 50 years of the city of Melbourne, it was displayed in the Melbourne Exhibition Building for nearly 30 years before being taken into storage. Relatively small for a Cyclorama, it measured just 100 feet long and 13 feet high.