Touch the Elbow - Blogging the Civil War

After a long hiatus it's time to get back to the 2010 Gettysburg Seminar and what better place to pick up then to take a behind the scenes peek at the Cyclorama.



If someone knows more about the Gettysburg Cyclorama than Sue Boardman let 'em step forward. That might be a cue for Kathryn Porch to take one baby step forward, after asking, "Mother may I," because, after all, she and Boardman teamed up to write a book on the subject, "The Battle of Gettysburg Cyclorama: A History and Guide." Porch wasn't in the Ford Education Center, but Sue was and she seized the opportunity to impart her knowledge of the 126-year-old painting that's had as rough a go in life as the battlefield itself.

So here are some very brief facts that you can use to impress your friends with when you view the Cyclorama.

There are 14 panels, each measuring 26 feet in width and weighing 950 pounds. Total length 377 feet. Each section was painted by Paul Phillippoteau's team of artists while their canvas hung vertically. Philippoteu drew grid lines on the canvas to help the artists achieve symmetry and perspective. The present Gettysburg Cyclorama was one of four completed by Philippoteau and originally on display in Boston, while the others were shown in Chicago, Washington, and Brooklyn.

The Boston painting wound up in a wooden crate after that show closed around 1892 and was left exposed to the weather in a vacant lot, survived two fires, and was eventually sold to a Newark, New Jersey department store owner, who cut it up into small segments and draped the pieces from the balcony of his flagship store. Those pieces were eventually reunited and brought to Gettysburg in time for the 50th anniversary of the battle, where it was housed in a ramshackle building until 1942 when purchased by the National Park Service.

After undergoing an 11 million dollar restoration the Cyclorama is in many respects like the refurbished Sistine Chapel ceiling. The painting which had grown dark and lost much of its detail over time, turned out to be luminous when layers of ordinary house paint, applied during an earlier restoration effort, were carefully stripped away by conservators. The painting is magnificent to say the least and is now hanging properly, as it did in Boston, for the first time in over 118 years. Boardman said, too, that viewers should take note of the foreground which is comprised of Civil War artifacts donated by private collectors, something that was missing from the old Cyclorama, but which was part of Philippoteau's vision of creating as realistic a depiction of the battlefield as possible.

We were escorted upstairs and allowed the special treat of viewing the Cyclorama for close to twenty minutes with the houselights fully turned on, the second time I've had that lengthy experience. But we weren't finished yet, because we were then given an opportunity to see something very few visitors will ever chance upon, a chance to go into the belly of the beast, so to speak. To that end we were led downstairs, through a door that's normally open to staff only, through a narrow hallway, until we were directly underneath the viewing platform and face to face with the Cyclorama itself, so close that each of us could have reached out and touched it.


The Cyclorama From the Theater



[Artistic license - The death of Abraham Lincoln]



[Artistic license - The death of Gen. Lewis Armistead]













Going Behind the Scenes