Happy Monday! Here’s some eye candy from Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles by Erkki Huhtamo to kick off your week.
The title page of Edward Hazen’s The Panorama of Professions and Trades; or Every Man’s Book (Philadelphia: Uriah Hunt, 1837).
Postcard from Leipzig, Germany, showing a typical panorama rotunda inside a beer barrel, c. 1900. Author’s collection.
Bertall [Albert Arnould], “La foire aux idees” (The Fair of Ideas), political cartooon from Journal pour rire, no. 37 (Oct. 1848). Utopian and socialist thinkers are shown as showmen marketing their own “oramas.” The cartoon was published in the thick of the revolutionary “Crazy Year” of 1848. Author’s collection.
Two frames from “Paul Province’s Visit to London,” a folded print (leporello) made up of twenty four London images, c. 1846. The visitor is seen in the darkness of the Regent’s Park Diorama, and in the Colosseum viewing George Danson’s panorama London by Night (installed in 1846), making a “reality check.” From a Victorian scrapbook. Author’s collection.
Milton Bradley’s three toy moving panoramas: The Historiscope, The Myriopticon, and the Panorama of the Visit of Santa Claus to the Happy Children. Springfield, Massachusetts, after 1866. Author’s collection.