Katie Trumpener– “Panoramas”, gigantic paintings in the round, were first created and exhibited in Britain in 1792. Rapidly taken up across Europe, then around the world, they remained a central nineteenth-century art form–and an equally crucial (if sometimes spectral) force in twentieth-century visual culture. Indeed, the recent book On the
Tim Barringer– Jeff Wall’s photograph Restoration of 1993—a luminous transparency almost five meters wide—reveals the spectacular scale and complex mechanics of nineteenth-century panoramic paintings. The word “panorama” was coined in 1791 to describe circular painted canvases, some reaching 300 feet in length and 50 feet high. Installed in specially-constructed buildings,
“British Art” lay at the margins of art history until the 1980s – the very phrase an oxymoron, a Yale colleague told me, since there is no British art to speak of. A certain introspection haunted even brilliant interpretative essays such as The Englishness of English Art (1956), given as