Before Hollywood

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

Panel from the Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi
by John Egan

The movie, Loving Vincent, is an astounding, audacious artistic achievement and a testament to the power of painting. This stunningly beautiful film is made up of over 65,000 individual oil paintings executed by 120 artists. No film like it has ever been made before and we feel that it is the crowning glory in today’s artistic visual culture. We wondered if this idea of moving paintings has any antecedents?

In 1791, Robert Barker invented a kind of moving panorama to depict his impressions of Edinburgh. Made up of contiguous views of passing scenery mounted on huge spools, the scenes would scroll past viewers behind a cut-out facade which hid the apparatus. The moving panorama usually had a narrator or delineator, who described the scenes as they passed by. In 1811, a 1,300-foot panorama was created to celebrate the Federal Procession in P…