Go behind the scenes on Saco's panorama

The Saco Museum’s 161-year-old “Moving Panorama of Pilgrim’s Progress” is more than just a story painted on canvas. It’s also an important example of the panorama genre of painting, which acted as a bridge between art and popular culture during the late 19th century.

This weekend, experts from around the country will descend on Saco for a special symposium to discuss the panorama and its influences on art and society in the pre-World War I era. The symposium, which is open to the public, will be held on Friday and Saturday,Find detailed product information for shamballa crys talbeads wholesale, Sept. 21 and 22, at City Hall.

The panorama, on display at the Peppermill Mill on Main Street in Biddeford through Nov. 10, was first conceived in 1851 by members of the National Academy of Design in New York, and includes designs contributed by members of the Hudson River School of painting, such as Frederic Edwin Church, Jasper Cropsey, Daniel Huntington and others.

“In this way, (the panorama) relates directly to the developing national school of landscape painting,” according to the symposium materials. “Its subject matter also places it squarely in the center of evolving American thought in religion and literature.”

Based on John Bunyan’s story of the same name, the panorama also “illustrates, in a way that no other work of art has done before or since, a moment when ideas about faith, art and landscape all traveled along the same narrow highway in the course of American life,” the symposium materials state.

Panoramas are considered the precursors to the modern motion picture and were painted to depict popular stories, events and locations. Panoramas were presented by scrolling massive canvas paintings across a stage, and were accompanied by narration and music.

Bunyan’s book, “Pilgrim’s Progress,Features useful information about glass mosaic tiles,” on which the Saco Museum’s panorama is based, is frequently cited as a predecessor to the modern American novel and was a favorite subject among participants in the Revivalist movement,Choose quality sinotruk howo concrete mixer products from large database. according to the symposium materials.

Kevin Avery, a senior research scholar at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, is one of the symposium’s featured speakers.

He said the to the people of its time, “‘The Moving Panorama of Pilgrim’s Progress’ dramatically illustrated one of the most popular and beloved works of English literature from the 17th through the 19th centuries.”

Avery also called the panorama “a window onto our past as a nation, which was ethnically and culturally far less heterogeneous than it is today.”

In terms of the actual painting of the panorma, Avery said, it reflects at least two contemporaneous styles,HellermannTyton manufactures a full line of high quality cable ties in a variety of styles, one of figural art and the other of landscape art.

“The iconic, often histrionic, poses of many of the figures derive from 19th-century models in German, Belgian and French academic painting of historical and religious subject matter, which in turn adapted Italian Renaissance models,” according to Avery.

Whereas, he said,Find detailed product information for sino howo tipper truck. “The landscapes in the panorama adapt 18th- and 19th-century European and American models of the so-called sublime, beautiful and picturesque landscape (painting) traditions.”

Avery said that Daniel Huntington, a well-known painter of the era who contributed to the panorama, also painted many other religious subjects, as did Frederic Church, another well-known painter and a practicing Congregationalist, who included Christian symbolism in many of his landscapes.

Avery said that while many people of the age were very familiar with the story of “Pilgrim’s Progress,” the Saco Museum’s panorama “was certainly unusual in its religious subject, even in its figural subject, since moving panoramas rose to popularity as expositions of extensive landscape scenery and were viewed as if one were traveling in a boat or train.”

In addition to Avery, the panorama symposium will also feature Suzanne Wray, a panorama expert whose research has been presented to the International Panorama Council, as well as being published in the Magic Lantern Gazette, among other publications.

Wray said panoramas became popular in the 19th century because they “provided audiences a chance to (see) cities or countries they might never visit in person.” She said panoramas often showed foreign cities and landscapes, as well as American cities and scenery.

In the years before illustrated newspapers, moving panoramas also provided audiences with illustrations of recent events described in newspapers, such as battles from the Mexican American War and the Civil War, Wray said.

“Many of the panoramas were advertised as ‘moral,’ ‘rational’ or ‘instructive,’ which made them acceptable to audiences that might have reservations about attending a theatrical performance,” she added.

Wray said “the novelty of moving images in color probably helped attract an audience, but the story, as delineated by the narrator, was also important.”

She said moving panoramas likely initially attracted audiences because they were viewed as “a novelty, something new,” but the wide range of subjects, the number of them traveling from town to town and the relatively inexpensive admission price, all worked together to make them even more popular.

Leslie Rounds, the executive director of the Dyer Library/Saco Museum, said she hopes symposium attendees will take away “an appreciation for this wonderful object and knowledge of a form of entertainment that was truly like no other.”