An Impossible View: Panorama van Scheveningen
By Sophie Turner
Challenging the boundary between life and virtual reality, art and visual media is obsessed with extending the scales at which human perception operates. With the advent of 3D cinema, virtual reality and perhaps the metaverse, society’s finds joy in deception – where the effort of suspending our disbelief is minimal. Whilst the technology may have developed, this desire for visual trickery really took off in the early nineteenth century; a period that French film-director, Jean-Louis Comolli, defined as “the frenzy of the visible”.
I recently spent a day, amongst friends, visiting museums in The Hague, a Dutch city rich with art and home to country’s government and royal family. Knowledgeable of the city and its collections, my friend suggested we visit the Museum Panorama Mensdag, remaining purposely ambiguous as to what we would find inside. Upon entering the museum, we were directed up a staircase that led into a viewing tower. As we emerged, I was met with a breath taking vista – a 360-degree panoramic view of the old fisherman’s village of Scheveningen as it looked in the nineteenth century, long before the village was enveloped by urban expansion of The Hague. With the Netherlands synonymous with flat expansive views, the beach vista functions like an optical illusion that, taking into account the limit of human vision, gives the impression of space receding into the distance.
Hendrik Willem Mesdag, Panorama van Scheveningen, 1881. Museum Panorama Mensdag, The Hague.
Throughout history, artists and designers have worked to produce instruments and techniques that trick the eye through illusion. One can think of Trompe–l’Œil painting, the camera obscura or the flip book as evidence of this desire. At the end of the eighteenth-century, the English artist Robert Barker was the first to push the boundaries of painted visual reality with the panorama. Even well-received academic painters such as Joshua Reynolds, the first president of the Royal Academy of Arts, was reported to have said that the panorama was ‘capable of producing effects, and representing nature in a manner far superior to the limited scale of pictures in general’. Positioned at the centre of the panorama, the viewer is surrounded by a 360-degree circular painting that was exhibited on the interior of a cylindrically shaped structure. Before accessible travel, the early panoramas gave viewers the opportunity to experience sublime landscapes, cityscapes and topical events from anywhere in the world.
A diagram of Leicester Square Panorama. London, c. 1802.
However, with the advent of popular cinema at the end of the nineteenth century, the panorama grew out of favour. Many panorama buildings were consequently demolished, and their paintings lost. Fortunately, the Mesdag or Scheveningen Panorama, as it is otherwise known, was preserved and is now the oldest of its kind that can still be visited at its original location.
In this digital age, we are now well accustomed to expanded scales of view. Yet, walking out into the panorama, I was still left speechless and in awe of the effect that the illusion created. Measuring 120 metres in circumference and 14 metres high, the Scheveningen Panorama is the largest painting in the Netherlands. Whatever the scale of the painting, traditional landscapes suffer from the limits of the frame. The viewer is strongly aware of edges of the image which delimit the view to a single perspective, with the expanse of the landscape often alluded to rather than depicted. Instead, the only apparent limit when viewing the panorama is the human eye; one has to walk around the viewing platform to take in the impossibly large view. Whilst moving laterally around the viewing platform the image is boundaryless, the canvas does have upper and lower limits and yet these are obscured with real sand at the bottom and the viewing tower overshadowing the canvas’ top edge. Captured in exquisite detail, one forgets that you are indeed looking at a painting, only enhanced by the sea-side soundscape and real-life objects strewn about the sand before the image (in historical panorama’s there are reports that real life goats roamed in front of an alpine landscape).
A visitor emerging from the stairs to view the Panorama van Scheveningen.
The Hague is now a bustling metropolitan city; the Scheveningen skyline is dominated by high-rises, a seaside amusement promenade and a pier. Jonathan Crary argues that an early ‘important definition of the adjective panoramic […] is the notion of a full 360-degree view that has no obstructions, nothing blocking an optical appropriation of it’. The viewing platform appears to be positioned on the Seinpost sand-dune, which in the nineteenth century offered an unobstructed view of the beach and village. This historic view thus extends the illusion for modern day audiences, overcoming the fragmentary perspectives of contemporary urban landscapes.
The Panorama van Scheveningen at the end of the Nineteenth Century.
Within the era of “the frenzy of the visible”, Jonathan Crary explores how the panorama contributed to a culture that perpetuated “disparity between a subjective visual field and the possibility of a conceptual and perceptual grasp of an external reality”. This dichotomy has only expanded with our developing technologies; we can now zoom out on google earth and view the whole world or put on a headset and enter into a virtual reality. However, these require modern digital technologies, the magic of Scheveningen panorama today is its assault on our senses simply from standing, walking around and looking. The Museum Panorama Mensdag is easy to miss, overshadowed by the likes of famous The Mauritshuis and other well regarded museums close by. However, this viewing experience is not one to pass up on! For almost 140 years, it has offered visitors an enchanting experience of place which, more than just capturing a reality, transports the viewer back to a different era.
Bibliography
Jonathan Crary, “Géricault, the Panorama, and Sites of Reality in the Early Nineteenth Century”, Grey Room 9 (2002): 5-25.
Malcom Andrews, Landscape and western art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
“Panorama van Scheveningen”, Museum Panorama Mensdag. Panorama van Scheveningen - Den Haag (panorama-mesdag.nl) [Date Accessed: 11th February 2024].