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| Milwaukee's Cyclorama painters and a section of the world's largest illusion c. 1886 |
In 1886, young Ehrich Weiss, the future Houdini, was living with his family at 517 Sixth Street in Milwaukee. Literally right around the corner, at Fifth and Wells, was the studio of the American Panorama Company, where a staff of topflight artists was building the world’s largest illusion, known as the Cyclorama. So big it had to be housed in its own special building, spectators entered through a tunnel and walked right into the middle of the Civil War:
[One] suddenly finds himself upon a high hill, with a stretch of 40 miles of country all around him and everywhere within the range of vision, on the hills, in the valleys, in the woods, on the open fields, in ditches and behind stone walls, and in shot-shattered shanties he beholds the soldiers of the blue and gray engaged in an awful struggle for supremacy.
-- Boston Herald, December 21, 1884
The Milwaukee Cyclorama was eventually installed in Atlanta, where it can still be seen today. It was the 19th century precursor to the Imax 3D theater, but even better because you got to walk around in real dirt with real artifacts right there in front of you. It featured three-dimensional lifesize sculptures and dioramas of soldiers, horses, cannon and so on, combined with a moving seamless backdrop of exquisitely painted, ultra-realistic battle scenes - in this case, the Battle of Missionary Ridge.
We have tried mightily to find documentation to prove young Ehrich Weiss saw this phenomenon in Milwaukee. Alas, we cannot find anything conclusive. But it is impossible for us to believe that the young Houdini did NOT visit the Cyclorama, since it was being built with great fanfare just a stone's throw from his house. A large panorama painting was a prime attraction at the 1884 Milwaukee Exposition, and the Northwestern Panorama Company built a huge panorama theater at Sixth & Cedar, just blocks from the Weiss home. Milwaukee became headquarters to many highly skilled European artists and scenic designers who hung out day and night at the Brunswick bar just half a block away.
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| The Cyclorama team at the Brunswick bar, near Ehrich Weiss's Milwaukee home |
We prefer to think Ehrich Weiss not only saw the Cyclorama and thrilled to it, as millions did -- he filed it away for his own future version of "The World's Largest Illusion." Years later, in 1918 at the Hippodrome in New York, Houdini may well have used the cyclorama principle combined with a slanted mirror to cause an elephant to vanish twice a day on stage in front of 5300 people.
COMING UP: NEW REVELATIONS ABOUT DR. LYNN
(Images: Wisconsin Historical Society, Google)
I am writing the first spreadsheet from the American point of view about 19th century rotunda panoramas.These were the biggest paintings in the world, 50 x 400=20,000 square feet, housed in their own rotundas which were 16-sided polygons. Chicago in 1893 had 6 panorama companies and 6 panorama rotundas. From 1885-88 William Wehner (1847-1928) of Chicago produced two units of BATTLE OF GETTYSBURG, two units of BATTLE OF MISSIONARY RIDGE & LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN and three units of JERUSALEM ON THE DAY OF THE CRUCIFIXION at his panorama studio in downtown Milwaukee. On September 18,2003 I found in the display case of Milwaukee County Historical Society the F.W.Heine diaries 1879-1921. These illustrated diaries are the only narrative of a panorama company in the U.S., that of William Wehner. The diaries needed to be transcribed in German , transcribed in English, scanned to computer. Michael Kutzer, born 1941 in Leipzig like Heine, is transcriber of the Heine diary project. The Heine diaries are as important to the history of rotunda panorama as the letters of Theo and Vincent Van Gogh are important to the history of Post Impressionism. There were two panorama facilities in Milwaukee on the same block: Kindt & Gardner's cyclorama hosted BATTLE OF VICKSBURG (by K & G studio), and later BATTLE OF GETTYSBURG by Reed & Gross studio of Chicago. Wehner's studio was NOT OPEN TO THE PUBLIC because (1) trade secrets were involved and (2) panorama companies spied on one another. The Heine diaries reveal that Susan Frackelton's students visited the Wehner studio, and Wehner's artists visited the Frackelton studio. WHAT I WANT TO KNOW is whether Carl Ethan Akeley (1864-1926), father of modern taxidermy, ever visited the Wehner studio. Akeley worked at the Milwaukee Public Museum which in the 1880s was in the Exposition Building across the street from the Wehner studio. In 1889 Akeley's MUSKRAT DIORAMA was put on display at MPM, and still exists. Later he came to the Field Museum in Chicago and created THE FOUR SEASONS, a natural history panorama employing a buck, doe,fawn and juvenile Virginia deer for each of the four seasons, 16 animals total. My great aunt, Mathilde Georgine Schley (1864-1941) was an artist-model at the Wehner studio in downtown Milwaukee. There are 10 photos of Tante Tilde and other young people from February 1888 dressed in pleasant costume, posed in tableau vivant, lending their human scale to the canvas JERUSALEM ON THE DAY OF THE CRUCIFIXION which stands behind them. The photos were made by Bernhard Schneider (1843-1907), whose cache of 300+ glass plate negatives were found at his residence in Cedarburg. Info to share.genemeier@frontier.com
ReplyDeleteFascinating! We must assume you've already combed the records of the Wisconsin Historical Society and the art history library at the University of Wisconsin. Paging Tom Boldt! Any ideas for our friend here?
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