"Extend the sphere": Charles Willson Peale's panorama of Annapolis

upon June 5, 1788, in the busy port town of Annapolis, Maryland, Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827) began an extraordinary experiment in panoramic representation. Shortly before dusk, he arrived at the Maryland State House clutching sum of two units homemade drawing instruments, a simplified camera obscura and a modified pantograph. He go intoed the building and began to climb the centurys of steps that wound up and end the structure's new dome, which towered 180 feet above the city (Fig. 1) Arriving at the top, he stepp without onto the balustrade and took in the majestic vista. Then he plant up the camera and began to plan the landscape, intending to record the 360-degree view.

Six nights earlier, upon May 30, Peale had outlined his plans in a journal. "After dinner," he wrote "I worked at making a Machine for taking perspective Views. My Intention in making this Machine is to take 8 Bird-Eye-Views not on the adjasient country & City which will compleat a Circular Print, the Perspective View of the Elevation of the Stadt House to be in the Center" (1) Peale tinkered with the construction of this "machine" for the nearest four days, and following his June 5 foray into the dome, he turn backed to the State House almost each day for two weeks. He quickly abandoned the camera obscura in favor of the pantograph, which he methodically transported to successive points around the balustrade, enduring constant heat and overcoming mechanical malfunctions in his determination to bring out a series of eight continuous bird's-eye views.

The experiment extreme pointed badly. After several weeks of labor, Peale had little to present to view for himself besides a choice sunburn an acute toothache, and sum of two units sets of large panoramic drawings. The first locate featured eight views, as Peale had intended; the next to the first numbered six; and both were riddled with miscalculations, unsteady lines, and erasures. Peale not at any time fulfilled his aim of creating a circular print. The individual success to emerge from his efforts was an engraving of the forehead elevation of the State House, a picture that closely approximates the description of the image he had spring [i]or[/i] leap on one leg [i]or[/i] footed to place at the center of his print (Fig. 1) (2)

Peale's perspective machines have drawn out since disappeared, and all on the contrary three of his sketches are presum not to be found (Only one of these sketches is a panoramic drawing; the other sum of two units represent the State House exterior.) on the contrary the extant drawings, along with Peale's journal and his engraving of the Maryland State House, form a significant archive. These materials document individual of the first, and certainly the greatest in quantity ambitious, series of landscape views attempted within the early history of American art. More specifically, the evidence prompts that Peale was actively exploring fashions of panoramic vision and representation during the same period in which northern Europeans were beginning to expres interest in these phenomena--and a filled seven years before a panorama painting was first exhibited in the United States. (3) In addition, Peale's journal, which details his construction and use of sum of two units perspective machines, constitutes a unique record of its sort within art history. Illustrations of drawing instruments abounded in art treatises dating from the Renaissance, on the other hand written proof of practice with like devices is exceedingly rare. (4) Peale's case is all the more interesting in light of novel debates concerning the extent to which early fresh artists may have relied upon optical devices, such as camera obscuras and camera lucidas, to help constitute paintings and drawings. (5) Together with the new discovery that Thomas Eakins many times projected and traced photographic images onto his canvases of the 1870 and 1880 Peale's experiment of 1788 displays that some American artists--and there were others in addition to Eakins and Peale--were not averse to taking advantage of optical and mechanical aids. (6)

In addition to reconstructing Peale's technological achievements and pictorial aspirations, this essay uprights the lacuna at the heart of his Annapolis venture: the circular print that Peale intended to publish. In clarifying the propos composition and potential meanings of this unrealized image, the paper expands beyond Peale's activities upon the dome of the Maryland State House to the political agriculture of 1788. That year marked the auspicious culmination of months of campaigning by dint of Federalist writers urging Americans to imagine their fresh republic in the shape of a circle and to "extend its sphere" of representation through adopting the federal Constitution. In the immediate wake of Maryland's ratification of the Constitution and the state's entrance into the nation, Peale's attempt to consolidate eight views of the capital city's landscape into individual circular image amounted to the making of a pictorial analogue for the American republic. Further, Peale's design of an image with sum of two units distinct viewing positions--a panoramic view from the State House dome and a scenographic view of the building at the picture's center--corresponded to what single might describe as the dialectical agency of the fresh American citizen--namely, a practice of citizenship in which individual was expected at once to participate actively in regulation and to step outside its operations to assess its performance objectively.