- Scene painting was considered an unsuitable job for a woman, especially as the procedure followed in Australia was the ‘English’ method in which an enormous canvas suspended on a vertical frame was painted by an artist who either climbed about on scaffolding or was winched across the surface of the painting in a bosun's chair; the ‘continental’ method (now in use in most Australian theatres), in which a canvas lying flat on the floor was painted by a standing artist, might have been thought more congenial to a nineteenth-century ‘lady’ painter. The earliest Australian woman scene painter I have found so far was the (unnamed) ‘talented and gifted wife’ of the turn-of-the-century scene-painter Harry Whaite, who assisted him at his workshop in Comber Street, Paddington; see Footlights, 30 November 1910, p.9.
- Barbara Novak, ‘Grand opera and the small still voice [sic]’, Art in America, March-April 1971, pp.64–73; reprinted (without this telling association) as ‘Grand opera and the still small voice’, Nature and Culture: American Landscape Painting 1825–1875, London, 1980, chapter 2.
- Robert Dixon, ‘Colonial newsreel’, in Creating Australia, ed. Daniel Thomas, AGSA catalogue, Adelaide 1988, p.66; and Mimi Colligan, ‘Canvas and Wax: Images of Information in Australian Panoramas and Waxworks with particular reference to Melbourne 1849–1920’, PhD thesis, Monash University (Department of History), 1987. Colligan's thesis is the first scholarly treatment of the panorama in Australia.
- Editors’ Note: see the article in this issue on Panorama and the Panopticon by Gordon Bull.
- As distinct from the Northern European ‘reverential gaze’; Albert Boime, The Magisterial Gaze: Manifest Destiny and American Landscape Painting c.1830–1865, Washington, 1991, pp.21–22. Boime acknowledges the ‘Foucauldian ring’ of his terminology, but claims to have been teaching ‘that the elevated point of view signified mastery over the land’ since 1968 (Boime, p.x).
- Oil on canvas, each 100 × 161 cm (approx.) except for The Consummation of Empire which is 130 × 193 cm (approx.), painted for Luman Reed, now New York Historical Society; see Timothy Burgard, ‘The Luman Reed Collection: Plates’, in Ella M. Foshay, Mr Luman Reed's Picture Gallery: A Pioneer Collection of American Art, New York, 1990, pp. 130–140.
- Joseph Lycett, Views in Australia, or New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land Delineated, London, 1824; James Wallis, An Historical Account of the Colony of New South Wales… Engraved by W Preston, a Convict; from Drawings Teken on the Spot, by Captain Wallis, of the Forty-Sixth Regiment, London, 1821.
- Robert Dixon, ‘An inferior branch of the art: Colonial topographical painting’, in The Course of Empire: Neo-Classical Culture in New South Wales 1788–1860, Melbourne, 1986, chapter 3.
- ‘Advertisement’ in Lycett, p.i (presumably not written by Lycett himself but by his publisher J. Souter).
- James Wallis, quoted in Dixon, The Course of Empire, p.61.
- Lee Parry, ‘Landscape theater in America’, Art in America, vol.59, November-December 1971, p.59. John Banvard was both painter and proprietor of this panorama. It was first exhibited in Boston and in New York, and opened at the Egyptian Hall, London, at Christmas 1848; see Ralph Hyde, Panoramania: The Art and Entertainment of the All-Embracing’ View, Barbican Art Gallery catalogue, London, 1988, p.133. The claims made for the size of moving panoramas would be credible if the advertised measurements were taken as square feet (i.e. amount of canvas covered) rather than as feet (length). A panorama advertised as 5,000 feet (“5,000 ft of canvas’) would, if the panorama were 10 ft high, be a realistic 500 ft long.
- The Route of the Overland Mail to India was shown at the Gallery of Illustration, Regent Street, London, from Easter 1850; the painters were Thomas Grieve, William Telbin, John Absolon and David Roberts; the lecturer was J.H. Stocqueler; see Hyde, p. 143. The Ascent of Mont Blanc was exhibited at the Egyptian Hall, London, from Easter 1852; Albert Smith was the proprietor and lecturer; William Beverley was the painter; Gideon Mantell was the critic who considered that the inclusion of a sublime subject in a panorama was a travesty; see Hyde, p.147. The Life of Wellington was presented at the Gallery of Illustration at Easter 1852; the painters were William Telbin and John Burnett; see Richard Altick, The Shows of London, Cambridge (Mass.), 1978, p.479.
- Claims for the uniqueness of the American moving panorama are made (inter alia) by Karin Hertel McGinnis, ‘Moving Right Along: Nineteenth Century Panorama Painting in the United States’, PhD thesis, University of Minnesota, 1983, quoted in Colligan, p.85; and Evelyn J. Fruitema & Paul A. Zoetmulder (eds.), The Panorama Phenomenon, Mesdag Panorama catalogue, The Hague, 1981, p.74.
- The moving panorama is thought to have been invented by the Grieve family of scene-painters (most likely by John Grieve, father of Thomas and William) for a Covent Garden pantomime at Christmas 1820; see Sybil Rosenfeld, ‘The Grieve family’, in Anatomy of an Illusion: Studies in Nineteenth-Century Scene Design, (Lectures of the Fourth International Congress on Theatre Research, Amsterdam, 1965) Amsterdam, 1969, p.42.
- Information from Jane Lennon in ‘J.W. Newland’, The Dictionary of Australian Artists: Painters, Sketchers, Photographers and Engravers to 1870, ed. Joan Kerr, Melbourne, 1992, p.570.
- Uncle Tom's Cabin consisted of fifty scenes ‘descriptive of the horrors of slavery… graphically described by [the] exhibitor’ (Illustrated Sydney News, 11 March 1854, p.178); it was shown at the Royal Hotel, Sydney, in February-March 1854, and at the Protestant Hall, Melbourne, in May (Argus, 19 May 1854; quoted in Colligan, p.97). Bachelder presented a series of imported moving panoramas in Sydney, Melbourne and the Victorian goldfields in 1867–68: Paradise Lost (see Freeman's fournal, 2 February 1867, p.7; Ballarat Punch, 19 October 1867); American War of Independence (see Sydney Morning Herald, 30 April 1868; information, Jane Lennon); and American Civil War (see Sydney Morning Herald, 11 May 1868, p.4).
- Melbourne Daily News, 22 November 1850, p.3; Argus, 6 December 1850, p.2; Argus, 11 December 1850, p.2.
- Frank Cusack, ‘Edwin Roper Loftus Stocqueler’, in Joan Kerr (ed.), The Dictionary of Australian Artists, pp.758–60.
- Anita Callaway, ‘Augustus Baker Peirce’, in Joan Kerr (ed.), The Dictionary of Australian Artists, pp.614–616.
- Riverine Herald, 29 September 1869; quoted in Keast Burke (ed.), Newsreel in 1862, Sydney, 1969, appendix 3. It is likely, however, that neither the artist nor the reviewer had ever seen Frith's original.
- The Grand Moving Diorama of the Victorian Exploring Expedition was first shown as a panorama of twelve separate scenes in Melbourne early in March 1862, and grew to sixteen scenes by the time it reached Hobart a year later. The scenes were painted from sketches by the expedition's artist, Ludwig Becker (who died early in the expedition), from Wills's diary entries, and from the descriptions and sketches made by members of the rescue party. Thomas Chuck was the proprietor and exhibitor of the panorama; the painters were ‘Messrs Clark, Pitt, and assistants’ (Program for The Grand Moving Panorama of the Victorian Exploring Expedition, Theatre Royal, Hobart, 18 February 1863; reproduced in Keast Burke (ed.), Newsreel in 1862). ‘Pitt’ was William Pitt, the well-known Melbourne scene-painter; ‘Clark’ was presumably either Thomas Clark, the artist who later became drawing master at the National Gallery School in Melbourne, or his son, Alfred Thomas Clark. The father is the more likely choice (young Alfred, only seventeen years old and virtually unknown, being unlikely to have outranked William Pitt in the billing), but the thought of such a respected figure as Thomas Clark having been involved in such a frivolous and contemptible exercise is not a comfortable one for twentieth-century cultural highbrows, who would rather ignore or, if possible, deny that such things ever happened.
- Sydney Morning Herald, 30 October 1862.
- ibid.
- Argus, 27 December 1861, p.5.
- Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, Cambridge (Mass.), 1988, p.4.
- [Peter Nicholson], ‘Scenography’, in Cyclopaedia; or, Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences and Literature, ed. Abraham Rees, London, vol.31, 1815; quoted in William A. Armstrong, ‘Peter Nicholson and the scenographic art’, Theatre Notebook, vol.8, no.4, 1954, p.93.
- Graphic, 7 February 1880; quoted in Richard Southern, ‘The picture-frame proscenium of 1880’, Theatre Notebook, vol.5, no.3, 1951, p.61.
- Illustrated Sydney News, 17 March 1855, p.119. Eric Irvin, Dictionary of the Australian Theatre 1788–1914, Sydney, 1985, p.182.
- Sydney Morning Herald, 6 March 1882.
- Tahite (James Neild), Australasian, 22 June 1878, p.786.
- Age, 27 December 1861, p.5.
- A good description of the workings of Daguerre's original diorama is given in Altick, The Shows of London, pp.164–66.
- W.M. Akhurst, The House That Jack Built; or, Harlequin Progress, and the Loves, Laughs, Laments and Labors, of Jack Melbourne, and Little Victoria, Melbourne, 1869.
- Sydney Morning Herald, 15 December 1871, p.8.
- The Babes in the Wood (Theatre Royal, Melbourne, 1879); see Argus, 27 December 1879, p.12.
- A model transformation scene, using copies of original designs and appropriate lighting changes, is exhibited in the Theatre Museum (part of the Victoria and Albert Museum), Covent Garden, London. This demonstration does give some idea of the transformation experience, albeit on a very small scale.
- Garnet Walch, On the Cards; or, A Motley Pack, Melbourne, 1875, p.4.
- Toso Taylor, Cinderella and the Little Glass Slipper, Sydney, 1894. Performed at the Lyceum Theatre, Sydney, in 1894, and at the Princess Theatre, Melbourne, in 1895.
- Australis; or, The City of Zero, Sydney, 1900.
Australian Journal of Art
Volume 12, 1994 - Issue 1: In Memoriam: Ian Burn