A Description of a view of Thebes, now exhibiting at the Panorama, Broadway, corner of Prince and Mercer Streets, New-York

This image, created by Robert Burford, gives panoramic views of both the Temple of Karnak and the city of Thebes. It was based upon the original drawings of Frederick Catherwood, unique in that they were created with the help of a camera lucida.

A schematic drawing shows the two halves of Burford’s Description of a View of the Great Temple of Karnak and the Surrounding City of Thebes: the top half depicts the Karnak Temple as a panoramic landscape, while the bottom half gives a panoramic view of Thebes. In the top half, the ruins of the Temple of Karnak recede into the background, the foreground occupied by a desertscape of men, horses, camels, and tents. In the bottom half, an entrance pylon (“Propylon”) to the city of Thebes occupies the center, flanked by the smaller ruins of buildings and another series of pylons to the far right. More horses and men are scattered throughout the scene.

In its printed context, this image served a dual function. First, it acted as a printed advertisement for the Catherwood panorama in New York (particularly the panorama of Thebes). Second, the image served as a reference guide for the panorama patron, enabling them to locate the different sites depicted in the painting.

In 1829, Frederick Catherwood departed London for a second tour of Egypt and the Levant, where he would remain until 1835. Catherwood spent much of his time between 1832 and 1834 producing a detailed ground map of the Temple of Karnak and the city of Thebes; this map would form the basis for Burford and Catherwood’s panorama in 1839.

During the Romantic period, panoramas—particularly those of exotic places—emerged as a popular form of public entertainment (Comment 7-8). By the 1830s, Frederick Catherwood’s relationship with panorama proprietor Robert Burford, who converted many of his illustrations into panorma paintings, had established him as one of the premier travel artists of his day. This fact, together with Catherwood's unique and masterly use of the camera lucida, raises questions about the changing status of the camera lucida—an amateur device now in the hands of a world-famous professional artist—as well as about the tension between the use of the camera lucida to depict reality and its incorporation into the overwhelming visual experience of the panoramic landscape. 

When the Broadway Panorama burned down in 1842, all of Catherwood’s panoramic paintings, along with most of the original drawings, were destroyed. Consequently, no records of Catherwood’s panoramas exist outside of these drawings.