Suzanne's Mom's Blog

Back in the 1800s, two artists made a painting more than 1,200 feet long, which they then displayed in cities around the country. They charged admission to audiences interested in learning about the whaling life and the exotic places whaling ships dropped anchor on their long voyages.

Until October 8, the New Bedford [Mass.] Whaling Museum is offering free admission to see the painstakingly restored panorama. The venue is an old warehouse, the only place big enough to hold the painting in its extended form.

In the old days, this marvel traveled by train, sparks flying and burning holes in the painted sheeting, and audiences got to see it unscrolling in a frame that looked a bit like the whaling museum’s draped arch in the picture below.

Back then, people would not have been able to walk up and down and go back to an interesting spot to take a picture. At any given moment, they saw only the part that a narrator was describing. Because I could walk back and forth along the extended artwork, the pictures here may not be in sequence — I might be misleading you into thinking the ships got to Fiji before the Azores, for example. (By the way the volcano picture is from Cape Verde.)

Be sure to check out the whaling museum’s information. This link offers a short video. And this one talks about the conservation work: “Created by Benjamin Russell and Caleb Purrington in 1848, this Panorama has been displayed in a host of venues – from a national tour when it was created to the 1964 New York World’s Fair. It was donated to the Museum in 1918 and was displayed for many years. However, one can easily imagine what a century and a half of rolling, unrolling, display, and light can do to deteriorate nearly a quarter-mile of painted cotton sheeting. It has not been exhibited in its entirety for more than 50 years, and the Museum thanks Mystic Seaport for kindly storing this monstrous painting over the past year.”

At the Boston Globe last year, Jennifer McDermott wrote a good preview of the work, which was created, she says, “to capture all aspects of a whaling voyage. The panorama would be mounted on a system of cranks and reels to go across a theater 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.” …

McDermott adds that D. Jordan Berson, who managed the project, “spent a year spraying the panorama with an adhesive to stabilize a paint layer that had powdered over time. The conservator stitched sections that were taken apart, repaired thinning areas of the cotton muslin fabric and fixed holes and tears.”

Nowadays, most of us think it’s a crime to kill these magnificent creatures, but it’s worth knowing how it was done if only because there are still people in places like Japan and Norway whose job it is to do just that.