An early moving picture industry? Exhibition networks and the panorama 1810-1850

Abstract

In the first decades of the nineteenth-century, London audiences enjoyed a burgeoning number of shows and lectures. However, this rich exhibition culture, and the scholarly attention given to it, has overshadowed the simultaneous emergence of networks of touring shows that criss-crossed towns and cities across Britain. My chapter demonstrates the new-found mobility of two formats – panoramas and large contemporary history paintings - in the period from the 1820s to 1840s. While London was the acknowledged centre of the art world and home to the first panorama rotunda in Leicester Square, there was an significant number of regional exhibitions of painted images. During the early 1800s, panoramas started to be found at venues ranging from fairgrounds and Assembly Rooms. The moving panorama emerged as a format that was ideal for touring due to it being more portable than large circular versions; touring opportunities were, to a large degree, constitutive of the very nature of the format. Existing accounts, by focusing on the most distinguished London shows, fundamentally understate the scale and variety of panorama exhibitions. Similarly, there were no art institutions outside London and Dublin in 1800 but subsequent decades saw a proliferation of art societies and exhibitions, usually linked to the impetus for ‘improvement’. Touring exhibitions of large individual paintings – usually crowded with figures and action - started to occur in the 1820s and 1830s and took place with a degree of regularity from the 1840s onwards. When E.T. Parris’s paintings of Queen Victoria’s coronation were put on show in Bristol in 1839 at a local printseller, it attracted ‘many hundreds of the most respectable’. The growth of touring paintings of this kind blurred the distinction between fine art and commercial spectacle, and their exhibition practices shared many features with the panorama. Prior to widespread reproduction through prints and engravings, the significance of these exhibitions, and the mobility that enabled them, is that audiences had notably difference experiences of contemporary art compared to the hallowed space of the Royal Academy.