This interview originally aired on In the Moment on SDPB Radio.
Before film became the top "moving pictures," panoramic paintings were a popular form of entertainment. The paintings would be dramatically unrolled over a few hours with a presenter speaking about the art and its subject.
John Banvard was one of the most famous panoramic painters in the mid-1800s. He's most well known for "The Three Mile Painting," although it may have only been half a mile long.
Nicholas Lowe is a professor of historic preservation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He recently traveled to Banvard's final resting place in Watertown to research the painter and the cultural and historical impacts of panoramas.
__________________________________________________________________
Lori Walsh:
In the mid-1800s, a painting went on an international tour.
"Mississippi Panorama" depicted landscapes along the Mississippi from the mouth of the Yellowstone all the way to New Orleans. It was also known as "Banvard's Grand Panorama of the Mississippi" or "The Three Mile Painting."
Well, it was really more like half a mile, but either way, it was a world-famous painting by a world-famous painter, John Banvard.
While he was originally from New York, his final resting place is, wait for it, Watertown, South Dakota.
And that is where Nicholas Lowe recently traveled to study the painter and the mark he left on U.S. history. Nicholas is a professor of historic preservation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and he joins us now on the phone.
Nicholas, welcome. Thank you so much for being here.
Nicholas Lowe:
Hey, thank you for inviting me. This is exciting to talk about John Banvard.
Lori Walsh:
Tell us what your interest was in him in the first place. Where is the first time that you intersected with his work?
Nicholas Lowe:
I've been researching and kind of looking at this whole phenomenon of moving image panoramas. It seems to be very much an American thing, although they existed in other parts of the world as well, but it took off in a particular way here in the States.
And I began to research a particular painter from just about the same time as Banvard because there were a number of them. It wasn't just John Banvard. There were many people making these things, and they were typically showing landscapes depicting the spaces that were opening up because of the Westward expansion and all the rest of it.
They kind of communicated to audiences in the East and in Europe that America was a vast, unexplored nation or place because it wasn't fully a nation at that time. Certainly not in the way that we know it now. So I got involved in traveling along basically the Westward Trail following another panorama maker that had made a panorama called "The Grand Moving Mirror of the Overland Trail."
I went to the locations where this particular artist had been and looked at his drawings and compared it to the landscape today, and made my own works.
As a progression of that research, I got into looking at Banvard.
The moving panorama is one of a kind of panorama. The other panoramas are 360-degree rotunda panoramas. And they're also part of World's Fair Display in many cities in the US and sort of elsewhere in the world. It's a whole phenomenon, and it's a whole thing, which prefigured a lot of what we now understand as media technology that myself and colleagues who are studying these things find really fascinating.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. This is what I want to talk to you about is because, I mean, this was big for the time. This was a big deal at the time, figuratively and literally.
How did this artist sort of want to be in that space of being the first or doing something that hadn't been done before? What kind of person was he?
Nicholas Lowe:
Well, I would imagine Banvard would be a pretty outgoing soul. To present a panorama, you would have to be a showman of a kind. He would stand on a stage, probably in front of an opera house full of people. You would have to wax lyrical about the landscape.
So you imagine the kind of person he was, kind of vivacious, excited, happy to talk, had been out sort of traveling himself. I mean, many people who were in the West at that time were pretty intrepid folks. You had to be on the river, to be in any part of the unexplored territory was a bit of a challenge. So you imagine people were adventurous, and it seems that Banvard put on a pretty good show.
I mean, the accounts that you read of what he was like on stage was he was very entertaining. The performance that he gave was about three hours long, typically. I mean, I've read lots of accounts of it, and some seem to say it was maybe a couple of hours, and some indicate it was possibly three. It'd be like a whole evening's entertainment thing.
Lori Walsh:
It's a thing. It's a whole thing. We're going to do a thing now.
So how did this thing move? I mean, what kind of technology was involved in the display? It's not on a wall, it's not a permanent installation in a public art space. They rolled it up, but how did he get it around?
Nicholas Lowe:
Yeah. Well, to your point, it was billed as a three-mile-long painting. I don't know how real that is or whether that's even possible.
Typically, they would be on rolls. Maybe the rolls, if you imagine seven to nine feet high rolls of canvas, and typically those rolls would be about 150 feet long. They would get switched out mid-performance in much the way that when screening film you switch reels.
One of the things that people often talk about in relation to moving panoramas is that they prefigure what we now know as cinema. And I mean, there's a very clear relationship. It's storytelling. It's moving pictures.
Although the picture would scroll past, obviously it wasn't an animated image, although it would be animated with light. That's the thing. They were performative in the sense that they were often painted on a thin cloth, which is probably why many of them don't exist anymore because they were just very fragile, and they would shine lights from behind. There would be moonlit scenes across the Mississippi River. It's kind of romantic and dramatic.
So I guess it's equivalent to the kind of immersive technologies that we kind of know in another way. I mean, the feeling of being transported when you're watching a film is, I think, pretty consistent with how people would've experienced viewing one of these.
Lori Walsh:
All right. Nicholas Lowe, we're running up against time, but I would have 8,000 more questions for you, so hopefully you'll come back and talk to us again as we learn about this artist who died in Watertown and is buried there but had such an impact on the world of art and even cinema.
Nicholas Lowe:
Absolutely.
Lori Walsh:
Nicholas Lowe, scholar, thank you so much for telling us this story. We appreciate your time.
Nicholas Lowe:
Oh, you're welcome. Thanks for inviting me, and I would delightfully come back. Speak soon.
