A museum has restored the longest painting in U.S. and Canada
so it can share the story of American whaling with the public.
The 0.4-km-long panorama
toured the U.S. after it was completed in 1848. A section was featured at the
1964 New York World’s Fair. But the panorama deteriorated after so much
travelling on wagons and trains, rolling and unrolling. Paint dried up and
flaked off, and the panorama was put into storage.
The New Bedford Whaling
Museum enlisted the help of a textile conservator to fix the “Grand Panorama of
a Whaling Voyage Round the World.” Now it’s searching for a large venue to
display it.
D. Jordan Berson, who’s
managing the project, said he hopes this record of American whaling can
eventually return to some of the cities that were stops on the national tour,
including Boston; Buffalo, New York; and St. Louis.
“It’s a national treasure
that’s been out of the spotlight for too long,” he said.
Benjamin Russell and Caleb
Purrington created the panorama to capture all aspects of a whaling voyage.
The panorama would be
mounted on a system of cranks and reels to go across a theatre stage as a
narrator told stories of hunting whales and processing their carcasses. A
poster for the Boston stop in 1849 advertises tickets for 25 cents.
The audience members would
hear what it was like to round Cape Horn and visit Fiji and other far-flung
destinations as they saw painted scenes of those locations. Most people hadn’t
travelled to any of those places, and photography was in its infancy.
Source: THE HINDU-25th November,2017
