On April 23, it was my pleasure to speak about the Saco Museum’s Moving Panorama of Pilgrim’s Progress at the annual meeting of the Victoria Mansion, Portland, Maine.  Following are the remarks I delivered:

A Journey in Art: The Saco Museum’s Moving Panorama of Pilgrim’s Progress

Annual Meeting of the Victoria Mansion

April 22, 2010

 It’s my very great pleasure to speak with you today about the Saco Museum’s Moving Panorama of Pilgrim’s Progress.  In December of 2009 all us at the Dyer Library and Saco Museum we were surprised and grateful to learn that Save America’s Treasures had given us the very welcome holiday gift of a $52,000 grant to conserve the panorama and to create specialized tools for its interpretation.  The panorama is now at the Williamstown Art Conservation Center in Massachusetts, where it will receive treatment over the next year, and upon its return we’ll be embarking on a wide-scale project to make it accessible to our audiences in new and exciting ways. An operational fabric replica of the panorama will be created that will allow the panorama to be seen as it was originally intended, in motion, as well as a video replica that visitors can play on demand on our website. We’ll also be planning for a major exhibition and publication scheduled for 2012, which we hope that “panoramaniacs” worldwide will welcome as an opportunity to shed new light on this all-but-lost art form of the mid-19th century.

The moving panorama of Pilgrim’s Progress is inarguably one of the most significant objects in the collection of the Saco Museum; but it is a remarkable and distinctive work of art by any standards. Eight feet high and nearly 800 feet long, it is a rare surviving example of a visual entertainment medium that thrived before motion pictures. Moving panoramas, which peaked in popularity in the third quarter of the 19^th century, were meant to be displayed theatrically in front of a seated audience, with dramatic lighting, music, and narration. As the audience watched, the panorama was steadily unrolled from one gigantic spool onto another, creating the illusion that the painted scenes were progressing before the audience’s eyes. 

As popular as these moving panoramas were, less than ten survive worldwide today. The Saco Museum’s panorama is notable simply for being among those few survivors: forty-two of the original fifty-three scenes remain. But this is an extraordinary object in many other ways, too.  Its subject, for instance, sets it apart from other panoramas, most of which depicted historical events, stories from the lives of famous individuals, travelogues, or other fact-based topics. The Pilgrim’s Progress, by contrast, is a Christian allegory first published in 1678 in England by a preacher named John Bunyan, who wrote the epic while he was imprisoned for preaching without a license. And what you’re seeing here are the two opening scenes of the panorama, featuring Bunyan parting from his blind daughter and Bunyan’s Dream, both scenes that are actually derived from the author’s introduction rather than from the allegory itself. These, incidentally, were scenes that were added only later, in the second version of the panorama of Pilgrim’s Progress, which is the one that survives in the Saco Museum’s collection today.

In The Pilgrim’s Progress, life is presented allegorically as a landscape through which a man named Christian struggles from his home in the City of Destruction to his final destination at the Celestial City. Part One of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress was first published in 1678 with Part Two, which detailed the journey of Christian’s wife, Christiana, appearing six years later. Both Christian and Christiana endure many tests of faith. Early in the story Christian almost drowns in the murky Slough of Despond, is forced to climb Hill Difficulty on his hands and knees, and survives a battle with the monster Apollyon [slide: Apollyon and Valley] as well as a passage through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. The moral message of the Pilgrim’s Progress is cleverly conveyed by a story filled with adventure and excitement, and because of this it was hugely popular in England and the United States for more than two centuries.  Although it was written in 1678 England, it was theologically resonant with mid-nineteenth century American protestantism. During the Great Awakening and beyond, The Pilgrim’s Progress was second only to the Bible as the most widely read and translated book of the era. Many scholars have also argued that it helped to set the stage for the modern American novel.

 The dramatic stories of the Pilgrim’s Progress were an appealing challenge for the artists who were involved with the creation of the Saco Museum’s panorama.  The idea of a moralized landscape made it a natural choice for the panorama format, and what you’re looking at here are two different views of the Delectable Mountains. Panoramas in both their circular form and as moving panoramas have chiefly been about landscape of one kind or another – topographical, military, or travelogue – so the genre was a familiar one, even though the landscape itself was based on fiction rather than fact. It’s hard to tell from the images we’re seeing here today, but when you see the panorama in the flesh you can see that its actually all one continuous landscape—between each major event in the story, there’s a sort of intermediary passage of hills or trees or whatever that connects one scene to the next.  Landscape painting, then, which was still a relatively new art form in mid-19^th-century America, is a central theme of not only Pilgrim’s Progress the book but also the panorama itself.

 The original Moving Panorama of Pilgrim’s Progress was conceived in 1848 and was painted by artists Joseph Kyle and Edward May. Edward May (1824-1887) came to the US from England as a child, and later studied painting under Daniel Huntington, who would also become a contributor to the panorama. Earlier in 1847  May had painted a version of Bunyan Parting with his Blind Daughter, and although this scene did not make it into the original panorama, it did show up in the second version, which we saw just a moment ago. Ultimately May provided the design for the majority of the scenes in the panorama, and this view of the cave of the Giants Pope and Pagan is just one example. May left the United States in 1850 and had a long career in France. Joseph Kyle (1809-1863), whose portrait you see here on the left, along with his view of the Interpreter’s House, had a career as both portrait painter and as a panoramist. He was involved in at least nine panoramas, many with Jacob Dallas, who became his son-in-law, and with whom he painted the Saco version of the Moving Panorama of Pilgrim’s Progress.

Because the 1848 version was so successful, Kyle and May decided to paint a second edition. This second version, the one that survives in the Saco Museum’s collection, was completed by Joseph Kyle and Jacob Dallas in 1851.  Jacob Dallas (1825-1857) was a popular illustrator for the illustrated weekly magazines. He died very young at the age of 32. In addition to doing much of the painting, he also contributed some original designs to this second version of the panorama, including this view of the Arming of Christian. Like Kyle and May, Dallas was a member of the National Academy of Design in New York; together, these artists persuaded many of their friends and colleagues to contribute designs for some of the major scenes.

 Among those first-tier artists who contributed scenes were National Academicians and up-and-coming landscape painters Frederic Edwin Church and Jasper Cropsey. Church and Cropsey, of course, are recognized today as leaders in what we now term the Hudson River School of landscape painting. They were both clearly drawn to the idea of landscape that runs throughout Bunyan’s narrative. In their hands, subjects like the Valley of the Shadow of Death, by Church, and the Land of Beulah, for which Cropsey was paid $40, came alive to the panorama’s audience in a way that far outstripped the efforts of other panorama painters of the time. Their bold outlines, colors, and brush strokes have a parallel to Bunyan’s own simple writing style and the allegorical form of his story.

 Daniel Huntington was another of the National Academicians persuaded to contribute a design for the panorama of Pilgrim’s Progress. Unlike Church and Cropsey, Huntington was well known for his religious paintings. He was an obvious choice as a panorama artist since his easel painting of Mercy’s Dream, a scene from Part II of The Pilgrim’s Progress, was among the most popular paintings of the 1840s. And when you look at this side-by-side comparison, you can see how literally the composition of his easel painting, from the collection of the Met, was translated into the panorama. Huntington also painted the Christiana and her Family Passing through the Valley of Death, a scene from the section of the panorama that unfortunately has not survived.

 The British artist Henry Courtney Selous is listed in the catalog as the designer of three of the scenes, and these three scenes, as well as many of the others, are influenced work of the English romantic painter and master print maker John Martin. Martin’s illustrations for the Bible, Paradise Lost, The Pilgrim’s Progress, and many of his other prints made their way across the Atlantic, and may have had direct influence. Selous’s vision of the fight with the monster Apollyon, inspired by Martin’s illustrations, is among the most striking images in the entire panorama.

 It is worth mentioning that Thomas Cole, who is often recognized as the father of American landscape painting, was a looming influence in the work of the panoramists and their contemporaries, although he did not directly contribute to any of the panorama’s designs. He died in February 1848, the same year that the panorama was conceived. Just two years before, Cole had begun his allegorical landscape series The Cross and the World, which remained incomplete at his death, just as many of the artists who respected him were planning to create the Panorama of Pilgrim’s Progress. In Cole’s paintings God was manifest in the landscape and art served as the mediator between the divinity in nature and the individual viewer. It’s not hard to look at this study for the Cross and the World, from the collection of the Wadsworth Athenaeum, and see its influence in views of the Celestial City like the one we looked at by Cropsey just a few moments ago.

 Cole’s followers, which included Frederic Church and Jasper Cropsey, popularized this mode of heroic landscape painting. And what you’re looking at here, just for comparison’s sake, is the scene of Christian at the Cross from our panorama coupled with Church’s painted memorial to Cole, the full canvas and a detail. These artists presented what they believed was a higher style of landscape. Cole believed that incorporating Christian or historical themes into landscape helped to imbue the relatively new art form with something nearer the status of history painting, which for centuries had been regarded as the highest form of the painting medium. This approach infused the American landscape with meaning, much as Bunyan’s allegory identifies a challenge or a temptation or a virtue on each hill and rock and tree. With the popularity of the story of Pilgrim’s Progress in America, which encouraged the spiritual development of the common man, artists like Cole strove to make christianized landscapes accessible to the populace.

 It’s very appropriate that the story our panorama tells is one of struggling through hardship to reach a safe haven, because the panorama itself has traveled a long journey since its creation and enthusiastic reception in mid-19th-century New York. The first version of the panorama debuted at New York’s Washington Hall in November 1850, where it played for six months straight, easily four times as long as the usual duration of a panorama exhibition. Nearly one third of the city’s population paid 50 cents each for admission, with the result that the panorama grossed $100,000 at its very first venue.  After the revised edition, the Saco Museum’s edition, premiered just one year later, it was praised by the National Academy as “equal if not superior to any work of this class ever exhibited in this country,” allowing no doubt that it had all the artistic merit of the original, if not more.

The two versions traveled the country simultaneously for nearly three decades of the 19th century.  Handbills and programs, a couple of which you see here, proclaimed the panorama’s many attractions, including that the figures are “life-sized” and that it shows Bunyan’s story “in color!” You can see that the artists who contributed designs are prominently featured on both the program and the handbill, The interior of the program also quotes extensively from newspaper reviews in the many cities in which it had been exhibited.  The panorama was praised as “A masterpiece of Art which words fail to describe” and another reviewer commented that “As a work of art it is superior to any panorama we have ever seen.”

In 1850s America, appreciation for art and literature was still in its adolescence. No doubt much of the success of the panorama arose from the fact that it wedded the relatively new trend of landscape painting with the time-tested and beloved story of Pilgrim’s Progress, a subject that was unimpeachable in its literary merit and moral content.  Many of the reviews, correspondingly, described the experience of viewing the panorama in quasi-religious terms, practically suggesting that it was a spiritual duty to attend a viewing. One reviewer wrote, “Those who like strong sensations are encouraged to turn away from the Vanity Fair of Broadway and spend an hour with this admirably illustrated edition of one of the chiefest of English authors. If neither their artistic taste be gratified nor their religious impulses be quickened, they will at least be assisting to pay for a laborious and spirited work.” Another reviewer, upon observing a young woman who came to see the panorama, remarked, “With suppressed breathing and sympathetic anxiety she would watch some frightful passage in the pictorial story, praying all the while that both she and the wayfarer may be shielded from temptation and delivered eventually from evil.”

The fate of the earlier version of the panorama of Pilgrim’s Progress is not known.  The 1851 version, however, traveled the country well into the 1870s, before ending up here in Maine. Charles Shaw, a Biddeford entrepreneur, inventor, and all-around Renaissance man who also served as Biddeford’s mayor in the 1860s, had been an owner of the panorama during its prime. He either gave or sold it to its next owner, who stored it in a Biddeford barn for some period of years. While he apparently invited visitors to come and see it, it was no longer displayed in motion but just sort of tacked up on the barn walls all around.  In 1896 the panorama was donated to the York Institute, which was the Saco Museum’s predecessor.  And then, as hard as it is to imagine losing track of an 800-foot-long painting, once the most popular and profitable entertainment attraction in the country, that is exactly what happened. There is a record of the panorama being displayed at the York Institute in 1897, a year after it was acquired, and it is simply, again, lost track of while the museum changed buildings three times and was periodically shut down for wartime uses. There is no further record of its existence until 1996, fully a century after its acquisition, when then curator Tom Hardiman discovered it in the museum’s storage vault.

[slide: panorama off to W’Town]Tom deserves all the credit for recognizing immediately what it was and for working without delay to bring it back to life.  Only three short years after his discovery, restoration of about one quarter of the panorama was completed at the Williamstown Art Conservation Center. The restored section was put on a national exhibition tour, including an appearance at the Portland Museum of Art, giving new visibility to this unique object as well as the chapters in American history, theology, literature, and the arts that it represents.  The project that the museum is embarking upon this year seeks to build upon those great achievements of a decade ago, by completing the conservation of the remaining three fourths of the panorama so that it can be displayed in its entirety. And so once again it’s been shipped off to Williamstown, and it is our hope and our expectation that, with the great work of the folks at Williamstown, with the creation of the replica and video, with the presentation of the full panorama in an exhibition in the summer of 2012, and with the support and enthusiasm panoramaniacs everywhere, we’ll soon be able to see the Moving Panorama of Pilgrim’s Progress as none of us ever have before.