Day 271 - Versailles panorama

 November 18, 2021

As I enter Gallery 735, I exclaim, "Oh wow!" under my breath but audibly. It's a large space topped by a dark dropped ceiling filled with recessed lights, but what's most notable are the two huge canvases that line the curving walls that, I assume, were especially built to accommodate them.  The placard says that together, the two canvases are 166 feet long; I would estimate that they are 10 feet high. The paintings depict, on one side, an enormous and imposing facade, in front of which are spouting fountains and a grand approach, and, on the other, a formal, highly symmetrical garden, with a circular fountain in the foreground and a wide, tree-lined walkway leading to another fountain in the distance.  I immediately think, "This can't be anyplace in the United States; there were no buildings that were that large in the early 19th century" (and maybe not now, either). I then think, "It looks like Versailles" - or rather,  the pictures I've seen of Versailles, since I've never been there. [Or did Mama and I take a bus trip out to Versailles when we went to Paris in 1978? I honestly can't remember.]

And yes, it is Versailles! The painting is by John Vanderlyn, a native of Kingston, New York, whose dates are 1775-1852 and who spent two years at Versailles in 1814 and 1815 before returning to Kingston to execute the painting. I admire the careful detail, the almost photographic realism of the facade's stonework, of the  rams' heads adorning the stone urns in the garden, of the spray emerging from the fountains.  The scenes are highly symmetrical, but they are saved from being boring (as I suppose they were and are in real life) by the variable lighting (shadows are deeper on one side of the garden than the other),  by the uneven heights of the trees, and by the irregular  placement of small figures dotting the scenes - occasionally children or  sizable groups of people (like the squadron of soldiers in their three-cornered hats in the garden scene), but largely couples - mostly men and women, but occasionally two men. (Was Versailles a trysting place for gays back then, I wonder?) The visitors are elegantly clad, the men often wearing top hats, the women bonnets and shawls.

But the most interesting aspect of these paintings is the purpose for which they were made: to entertain and edify the American public,  and in so doing to earn a nice return for the painter. Panorama paintings like this one, only a few of which survive, were invented in Great Britain in the 1780s and were displayed in cylindrical buildings, which visitors could enter by paying a small admission fee. Vanderlyn raised money to construct a  building, called the Rotunda, behind City Hall in Manhattan,  where he could show his own panorama and historical paintings.  The placard describes the Rotunda as, effectively, the first art museum in New York and likens the popularity of the panorama paintings to that of movies today,

I feel as though I've stumbled upon a hitherto unknown to me piece of 19th century Americana. Americans who could only dream of going to Europe could nonetheless be introduced to its chief monuments and, surrounded as they were by the paintings, could feel that they,  along with the well-dressed visitors depicted in the scenes,  were themselves visiting these landmarks. (Actually, it rather reminds me of the ViewMaster I enjoyed as a kid, whose 3D images lent a "you are there" feeling to the viewing experience.) It's striking to me that Vanderlyn chose to depict European scenes rather than the natural wonders of the American continent (although I suppose that many of these had not yet been discovered, at least not by people of European stock), and I wonder what this says about both the aspirations and insecurities of early citizens of the republic.  

I never knew that this art form existed, much less that the Met had a grand exemplar of it (thanks to a 1952 gift of the Senate House Association of Kingston, which probably was eager to unload the work) and refurbished a gallery especially to accommodate it. I talk with David about this later, and he reminds me that Frederick Church's paintings of Niagara Falls were also monumental and very popular, so maybe I am over-interpreting the attention to European scenes as reflecting Americans' sense of cultural inferiority. It turns out that David knew a bit about panorama scenes as a form of popular entertainment, having read a paper or a dissertation by a colleague or a grad student - I don't remember the details - and it strikes me, not for the first time, that academicians who pay attention to the work of their peers are privy to all kinds of interesting and esoteric knowledge. I am envious.