This is a riff on an Allison Meir JSTOR Daily article.
A cyclorama is a panoramic image on the inside of a cylindrical platform, designed to give viewers standing in the middle of the cylinder a 360° view, and also a building designed to show the image. The intended effect is to make viewers, surrounded by the panoramic image, feel as if they were standing in the middle of the place depicted in the image. Art historians credit Irish painter Robert Barker, wanting to capture the panoramic view from Calton Hill in central Edinburgh, Scotland, with inventing the form, displaying it in a special building in Edinburgh in 1787.
Cycloramas arrived in the US by the middle of the 1800s.
In the fall of 1886, New Yorkers flocked to a circular structure in downtown Brooklyn to be transported to the Battle of Gettysburg, with bits of Cemetery Ridge and the Angle, but mostly Pickett’s Charge, the “high-water mark of the Confederacy.” A massive 360-degree cyclorama painting, the fourth of the battle created by a team of artisans led by French artist Paul Dominique Philippoteaux, on which soldiers charged and cannons fired, covered the inside walls of the curious room. Trees, fences, evergreens, and floorboards covered with sod lent authenticity. Skylights illuminated the canvas and props while leaving the spectator area dark, and the display included posed mannequins alongside the painted scene. So convincing were these figures that the police got called one evening to stop a robbery and apprehended two fake soldiers.
Cycloramas were very popular in the late 19th Century.
Cycloramas traveled from city to city, similar to a modern movie, and many artists, like Philippoteaux, produced multiple copies of their work. As the viewers stood in the center of the painting, there would often be music and a narrator telling the story of the event depicted. Because they required a specially designed building, they stayed in one place as long as the exhibitor made money or went broke, viable only where the location itself continued to attract visitors, like Gettysburg and Atlanta. Almost every major US and European city constructed circular and hexagonal-shaped buildings to provide a viewing space for cycloramas.
Atlanta and Gettysburg Cycloramas
The two best known surviving cycloramas in the US depict the Battles of Atlanta and Gettysburg. The restored Atlanta Cyclorama measured 42 feet high and 358 feet long, depicting the 20 July 1864 Battle of Atlanta, AKA Peachtree Creek. This cyclorama is not just a vivid visualization of that engagement, but a physical chronicle of what people wanted to remember and forget about the Civil War. It debuted in Minneapolis in 1886, where Northerners appreciated its representation of a Union victory, one depicted with details based on the artist’s interviews with veterans and visits to the battlefield. When Atlanta native Paul Atkinson bought it in the late 1800s, he used a bit of paint to turn a group of defeated Confederates into Union soldiers. Even a mannequin of Clark Gable joined the display in the 20th Century, as it continued to be reinterpreted and altered to reflect current tastes. Exhibitions that contextualize this past join the Atlanta Cyclorama.
A wealthy businessman in Boston commissioned the current Gettysburg Cyclorama, displayed at the Battlefield Park since 1961. At 42 feet high and 377 feet in circumference, it’s slightly larger than the Atlanta painting, still with mannequins in the foreground. First seen in Boston in 1884, it’s possibly the most viewed of the two.
Lost American Cycloramas
In August 1885, Chicago promoters, hoping to reproduce the sensational success of the Gettysburg Cyclorama, unveiled a new cyclorama of the Battle of Shiloh. It used the features of 2,000 actual participants in the battle, and when it opened just a week after the death of General Ulysses S. Grant, seemed poised for success. It may have had some, but the original is now lost; only photos of it and parts of one panel remain. Other Civil War cycloramas depicted the clash of Monitor and Virginia/Merrimac (one panel survives), the Second Bull Run, Lookout Mountain, Vicksburg, and Missionary Ridge, no parts of which survive. When movies arrived in the early 1900s, cyclorama ticket sales plummeted. Most of the hundreds of cycloramas that were produced worldwide vanished with little documentation.
Others Around the World
Experts consider the oldest cyclorama still on display dates from 1815, showing the city of Thune in Switzerland. The largest canvas in Russia depicts the Battle of Stalingrad. The 377 by 50 foot Pleven Panorama in Bulgaria, depicting the 1878 Siege of Plevna, is the largest painting in the world. Other canvases in the US, Europe, and the Middle East depict everything from the Crucifixion through the 1815 Battle of Waterloo, the 1871 Chicago fire, the 1950 Battle of Taejon in Korea to the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. War scenes popularized the art form, but more pastoral scenes such as Versailles Gardens, the ecology of Laysan Island, and Niagara Falls still draw.
For all their immense size, and even in the Age of the Internet, cycloramas still attract crowds.
Crop Duster: A Novel of World War Two
Perhaps it’s not surprising that aviation subjects have thus far escaped treatment by cyclorama artists. But just imagine what a formation of, say, five hundred B-17s on the way to a target might look like on a two-story high canvas. I’d buy a ticket.
And Finally...
On 10 October:
1886: James Brown Potter and Griswold Lorillard wore the first dinner jacket in the US at Tuxedo Park, New York. First commissioned in England, the tuxedo, with its cummerbund, stiff shirt front and bow tie, evolved from the tailcoat. The name crossed the pond only in the 20th Century.
1911: China’s Wuchang Uprising/Xinhua Revolution begins. It began as a rebellion by elements of the New Army in Wuchang against the ruling Qing dynasty that ignited the Xinhai Revolution, overthrowing China’s last (lasting) imperial dynasty and establishing the Republic of China.
And today is US NAVAL ACADEMY DAY, commemorating the opening of the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland on this day in 1845. America’s second oldest service academy graduated its first midshipmen—seventeen of them—two years later. Unlike modern grads, however, they used to serve aboard ship for two years before their final exams and commissioning. Why that changed is anyone’s guess.