In the early nineteenth century, the term "moving panorama" could refer to an optical entertainment (both the apparatus itself and the sequence of virtual prospects that it conjured); an unfolding view of an actual scene, whether of landscape, pageant, or streetscape; and "a series of images passing before the mind's eye" (OED).
This image provides a simulation (a linked sequence of picturesque views) of a simulation (the Diorama of Venice) of a tour of the actual City of Venice and its environs.
The fore-edge painting on the first volume of Sir Walter Scott's Kenilworth, probably depicts Kenilworth Castle; and the painting on the third, Cumnor Place; with both buildings pictured in the midst of a vast rural landscape.
This painting exists in two states: the first portrays the actual, "unimproved" prospect from the house at Tatton Park, as it was when Repton first visited the Park, on 8 Nov. 1791; the second depicts the same prospect as it would appear if "improved" by Repton.
The primary subject of this sheet of coastal profiles is the northwest American coast, fragments of which it presents as synecdoches for the whole. Before James Cook's voyages of discovery, naval draughtsmen created coastal, island, or harbour profiles only in broad outline, primarily as an aid to navigation (Richardson 69).
This work offers a view of the large group of Alutiiq Indians, carried by a fleet of canoes, who were encountered by Captain George Vancouver and his fleet at Port Dick, Alaska, on 16 May 1794. The former are seen, as if from the deck of one of the latter's ships, against the backdrop of a vast wilderness and an immense sky.
In late-18th and early-19th century Britain, popular interest in "scenes" that exceed or lie beyond the everyday world was heightened by factors such as the emergence of London as Europe's first world-city; James Cook's and George Vancouver's voyages of discovery, which completed in outline the modern map of the globe; and improvements in transport and communication technologies, which brought the distant into the orbit of the near. The consequent appetite for large scenes, evident in the cult of the sublime, was met in part by new virtual-reality technologies—most notably the Eidophusikon, Panorama, Moving Panorama, and Diorama—and an entertainment industry based on them.
This image depicts the failure of harmony in the marriage previously represented (in its partner print) as a harmonious courtship. Harmony is used as a visual pun in each print to convey first, the appealing fantasy of romance, and then the harsh reality of a marriage originating in such a fantasy.
This image depicts courtship as typically conceived by the Romantic imagination, as a moment of finding or establishing figurative harmony; such a moment or situation was dependent on the prior, elegant education of young ladies in certain, socially-mediating arts.
