Pilgrim's Progress

The Moving Panorama of Pilgrim's Progress, or Bunyan's Tableau. Click below arrows for a slide show of the panorama!

Pilgrim's Progress, a Panorama
	Slide 1

In the winter of 1848, National Academicians Edward Harrison May (1824-1887) and Joseph Kyle (1815-1863) conceived of creating a giant moving panorama illustrating John Bunyan's religious allegory Pilgrim's Progress. The moving panorama, essentially a long horizontal painting on canvas that moved a series of images from reel to reel across the stage for hundreds of feet, was at the height of its popularity in the 1840s. In the religious revival of the time, John Bunyan's 1678 allegory of a spiritual pilgrimage experienced its own revival. In the fine arts circles familiar to May and Kyle, Pilgrim's Progress became a popular subject for formal academic paintings. The most influential American artist of the day, Thomas Cole, died in 1848 while working on his Bunyanesque Cross and the World series. The English artists William Blake, John Martin, Henry Courtney Selous (Martin's pupil and a panoramist), and others produced illustrations from Pilgrim's Progress before mid-century.

This wealth of previous Bunyan images provided the visual framework on which May and Kyle based their panorama. Bunyan's narrative details the trials of protagonists Christian and Christiana as they journey from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City, through an allegorical landscape fraught with pitfalls and temptation. The subject lends itself well to the ideals embraced by contemporary 19th-century landscape and history painting, as well as the progressive nature of the moving panorama form. Between them, May and Kyle produced 36 designs for scenes. Others were contributed by Daniel Huntington, who provided his already popular image of Mercy's Dream; by Frederic Edwin Church and Jasper Cropsey, each of whom provided two designs; and by the eminent illustrators Felix O. C. Darley and Henry Courtney Selous.

The 54 finished scenes were painted on the 8-foot tall and 1200-foot long canvas by Kyle, May, and Jacob Dallas (1825-1857). The enormous panorama was wound onto giant wooden spools and, to the astonishment of spellbound audiences, unrolled across theater stages each evening accompanied by a lecturer and music. The panorama opened at Washington Hall in New York in November of 1850 and was a tremendous critical and financial success, grossing nearly $100,000 in its first six months. The immediate success of the panorama prompted the artists to produce a second version. Finished in April 1851, the “revised edition” was executed by Kyle and Dallas and, after traveling nationwide for decades, was ultimately given to the Saco Museum in 1896.

As the museum's location changed from various different buildings through the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and was periodically closed down for wartime uses (it functioned as a Red Cross station in World War II), the panorama was forgotten. It was not until 1996, a full century after it came into the museum's collection, that it was rediscovered in the storage vault, and it was this discovery that prompted its partial conservation and exhibition in 1999.  Hundreds of panoramas of both the moving type and the circular type were painted in the 19th century, but fewer than 10 of the moving type have survived. Presumed lost by art historians for 100 years, the Moving Panorama of Pilgrim's Progress is a missing link to one of the rare moments in American history when the divergent worlds of formal academic art, popular commercial entertainment, religious thought, and literature came together in a single object.