Surround Murals Provide Rooms With a View

Before there was television, before there was radio, before there were movies, there was panorama. The spectacular, 360-degree paintings--also called “roundviews,” “pictures without boundaries” and, near the turn of the century, “cycloramas”--captured epic events such as the battles of Waterloo, Gettysburg and Atlanta, and exotic urban landscapes: Constantinople, Cairo and the banks of the Nile.

Like contemporary mass media that melds art and entertainment, the 19th-Century panorama was essentially a commercial undertaking--one that enabled people of modest means to “travel” to faraway places while long-distance travel was still a costly and sometimes dangerous undertaking. Hundreds of the panoramas were mounted at major expositions in American and European cities, where admission was charged, and many went on tour.

Despite their wild popularity, only a handful survived. One of the estimated 25 still in existence is the Panorama Mesdag, in a nondescript building on a quiet, narrow street in the Netherlands’ leafy capital, less than an hour’s train ride from Amsterdam. In keeping with the history and culture of the Netherlands, the subject of the Mesdag is more subtle than some of the more celebrated of the genre. Created in 1881, the work portrays the nearby village of Scheveningen overlooking the North Sea.

When Vincent Van Gogh first saw the Panorama Mesdag, he observed, “The only fault of this painting resides in its being faultless.” Alas, the catalogue for this huge painting of the quiet fishing and resort village does not mention whether Van Gogh’s quoted observation was ironic.

This example of “the cinema of the 19th Century” is well worth a visit, if only as a cultural artifact; a precursor to Disney World’s 360-degree movies.

Like the Museum of Mechanical Engineering in Utrecht and the dollhouse exhibit in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, the Panorama Mesdag is a must for children. It is the perfect antidote for youngsters weary of being shushed as they tour museums full of dead Dutch admirals and merchants wearing frilly collars and pointed hats.

A walk up an ersatz lighthouse staircase quickly deposits the visitor into the last century. The circular wooden viewing platform appears to be set atop a huge sand dune, complete with real sand. As with other panoramas, the physical boundaries of the painting’s top and bottom are obscured--in this case on the top by the roof of the cupola, within which the viewer stands, and on the bottom by the sand dunes. This helps to encourage the sensation of being contained within the painting. A soundtrack of surf and sea gulls adds to the effect.

Just beyond the railing that encircles the viewing platform, the sloping sand is strewn with weathered ropes, nets, driftwood and, yes, wooden shoes. Somewhere beyond--it’s genuinely difficult to know for certain where--the dune falls away and the picture of the beach and village begins.

On the painting of the beach, as you look seaward, are a score of large fishing vessels. There are even some concessions to this war-fond genre, including a company of cavalry--complete with cannon--riding down the beach. But there are also little jokes, such as the portrayal of the artist’s wife working on a painting beneath a brick walkway on the beach. Elsewhere on the beach are children taking donkey rides. The land side features a red brick village, churches, taverns, factories, a few hotels, an exhibition hall, lighthouse and an inland canal.

Hanging above is the marked glass cylinder that the artist, Henrik Willem Mesdag, used to sketch the panorama.

Commissioned by a Belgian company, the panorama was conceived and painted by Mesdag, a 50-year-old marine artist who supervised a crew of seven artists (including his wife) and engineers. It took only four months to complete--the backers where in a hurry to draw customers. Nevertheless, the Panorama Mesdag never made much money, either at its original mounting or when it toured to Munich and Amsterdam in 1891. In 1885, Mesdag himself bought the panorama and the building from the Belgians. It operates today as a nonprofit museum.

The painting is 45 feet high, 123 feet in diameter and 390 feet in circumference, making it one of the largest panoramas ever painted. The viewing rotunda is naturally lit by 320 glass panes above the unvarnished canvas, giving the village a different look each day, depending upon the light.

Beneath the sand dune are a number of exhibit rooms with examples of other panoramas from the period, many of which are no longer in existence, as well as the sketches and drawings used to paint and mount the panorama and to construct the dune--long Mesdag’s favorite vantage point.

Mesdag himself represented a melding of commerce and art. The scion of a prominent banking family who married into an equally affluent family, Mesdag gave up finance for art at the age of 35. His specialties were seascapes, numbering in the thousands: ships at sea, shipwrecks, seas under cloudy and stormy skies, the beach at sunset and seaside villages. A sampling of this work--he won several prestigious medals but his work is not highly regarded today--can be found in the foyer of the Panorama Mesdag, which he considered his masterpiece.

After Mesdag’s death in 1915, his will provided for the Mesdag Rijksmuseum, also in The Hague, which contains about 50 of his works, along with a significant collection from “The Hague School” and one of the most complete Barbizon collections outside France. (For art lovers with more traditional tastes, The Hague’s best-known museum--the Mauritshuis--is stuffed full of Rembrandts, Vermeers and Breugels and is just a 15-minute walk from the Panorama Mesdag, past Queen Beatrix’s “working palace.”)

Whether or not panoramas are art is a question that has almost outlived the genre, but according to Kevin Avery of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, new panoramas have been painted in England, Australia and the Middle East.

Most recently, the debate popped up in Julian Barnes’ witty 1990 novel, “A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters.” A father points out that a panorama of the wreck of the French frigate “The Medusa,” on display in Dublin at the turn of the century, is far outdrawing a competing exhibition of Gericault’s original masterpiece, “The Raft of the Medusa.”

His daughter replies: “Mere novelty is no proof of value.”

GUIDEBOOK

Panoramas Around the World

--Panorama Mesdag, 65B Zeestraat (a five-minute walk from Noordeinde Palace), The Hague, local telephone 070-642563.

--In London, the smallest surviving circular panorama, L. Carracciolo’s 1824 “Panorama of Rome,” at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Also, the recently painted “Panorama of the City of Bath,” across the river at the Jubilee Gardens in the South Bank arts complex.

--Panorama Raclawice in Slowacki Park, 11 J.E. Purkyniego St., about half a mile from the National Museum of Wroclaw in Wroclaw, Poland. The 400-foot-long canvas depicts scenes of April 4, 1794, when about 6,000 Polish troops met 7,000 Russian regulars in the Battle of Raclawice near Krakow. Painted by Polish artists Jan Styka and Wojciech Kossak in the late 1800s, but closed in 1939 when the Germans invaded. Reopened in 1985.

--Gettysburg National Military Park contains an original of the Battle of Gettysburg, done in 1883 by French artist Paul Philippoteaux for the Boston Exposition.

--The Atlanta Cyclorama, depicting the Civil War Battle of Atlanta, at the Grant Park Zoo, housed with a Civil War Museum. Painted by 11 German and Polish artists in Milwaukee in 1885-86 and then taken to Georgia. Painting was restored from 1979-1982, and a catwalk replaced by a rotating viewing platform with seats. James Earl Jones narrates a 14-minute explanatory film in the museum.

--At the Metropolitan Museum in New York is John Vanderlyn’s “Panoramic View of the Palace and Gardens of Versailles,” painted in 1818-19 and mounted in a rotunda in the museum’s American Wing.