Tim Barringer will present at the Modern Design History Seminar on Wednesday, April 11, at 6 pm. His talk is entitled “The World for a Shilling: The Panorama as Global Landscape.”

From its inception, the painted panorama was understood as a global technology—a manifestation of limitless reach both in visual form and restlessly changing thematic content. The panorama emerged during a period of warfare between rival empires played out across much of the world, and offered nineteenth-century European and American audiences a place at the center of spectacular landscapes and historical events, familiar and unfamiliar. This lecture explores the condition of globalism embodied by the panorama’s form, and argues that through its insistent, phantasmagorical juxtaposition of “here” and “there”—home and abroad; familiar and exotic; imperial center and periphery; metropole and province; civilization and its others—the experience of visiting the panorama formed a paradigmatic viewing experience of modernity.

Tim Barringer is Paul Mellon Professor and Chair of the Department of the History of Art at Yale University. His books include Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (1999; new edition, 2012) and Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (2005). With colleagues he co-authored American Sublime, and co-edited Colonialism and the Object, Art and the British Empire, Writing the Pre-Raphaelites, and Art and Emancipation in Jamaica. He was co-curator of Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde (2012–13) and of Pastures Green and Dark, Satanic Mills (2015); he is curator, with Elizabeth Kornhauser, of Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and National Gallery, London, 2018). His book On the Viewing Platform: the Panorama from Canvas to Screen, co-edited with Katie Trumpener, is forthcoming with Yale University Press.