The Banvard Files

 

For several years I’ve been trying to find a place somewhere here in Louisville where John Banvard  painted the world’s largest picture in the 1840s. No luck.

   Not that it matters, but I don’t have cable. I have to fill the endless hours with something while I wait for things to come out on dvd. So I watch old movies, catch up on things I’ve never seen, and eventually, paddling back against the current of popular culture, I got caught up in Banvard’s Grand Moving Panorama of the Mississippi River, the first blockbuster motion picture, at a theater near me, in Louisville,1846.

  I did find some other things that might be of some interest. A few little errors, problems, and details. This is a brief collection of my notes about it.

   It didn’t occur to me to wonder exactly where Banvard’s studio had been until a friend asked me about it. At first, I just liked the story, and was content to know it happened around here somewhere or other. It was a happier, simpler time.  It was something to think about when I went around town, doing the things I had to do. I don’t like going around, doing things I have to do, and Banvard’s story fed my distracted way of looking at things as they pass--alleyways, the homes of people I don’t know, a basketball backboard with no goal, a shirtless man whacking at weeds with a handsaw, concrete steps leading up to an overgrown lot, incomprehensible graffiti, the street I was supposed to turn on. Who knows what forgotten things may have happened at any particular place, and left no sign?

    An 1846 letter by Lt. Selim Woodworth, a friend from Banvard’s boyhood in New York, described Banvard working in his Louisville studio, and is relied on in most accounts. (It’s reproduced at the bottom of this page.) It may be unreliable, and it often sounds like Banvard’s own writing. Although Banvard certainly did paint the panorama and show it here, the barn studio might be a part of his promotional mythology. He may have misdirected his contemporaries about where his studio was for the very reasons he said he built it--to avoid intrusions and distractions. And his accounts always stressed his independence. A vast studio built for the purpose may have sounded better than a barn his brother let him use, or any other arrangement involving help.

   

  It’s interesting, at least, to me, to understand as clearly as possible what this phenomenon of art and popular culture was, and what happened. Much of the information is obscured and fossilized in antique hype, excitedly promoting something that doesn’t exist. It’s similar to the hype and pop culture all around us now, but also different, with a different sound. Reading his multiple variations, little changes and tweaks of his story (and reading other ads and promotions of the time to form an idea of the context) I’ve grown to like Banvard’s stagey, unreliable voice. I’ve grown rather fond of these snakes on this plane.

     It’s unusual for someone to argue so directly that he has earned our attention, deserves reward, as Banvard does. There’s a “reality show” aspect to his presentation of the painting, and it probably resonated with  his audiences in much the same way reality shows still do. For his audience the panorama represented a geography many could not see first hand, and now it has become a kind of  geography we can’t see first hand. Like Pinocchio, it has become the kind of thing it depicted.

Banvard went down the Mississippi River on a small skiff, sketching the banks, then came back to Louisville to paint it on enormous rolls of canvas, which turned on rollers, simulating a boat trip on the river.

In the 1850s  Banvard was the most famous painter in the world, and maybe the first millionaire artist. The painting is gone, all the other great panoramas are gone, and Banvard is mostly forgotten. In the few articles about him nobody says exactly where his Louisville studio was, or the Apollo Rooms, where the panorama was first shown. I’ve tried to look that up, but have found no solid evidence the studio existed, but a few reasons to think it might not have, exactly. The panorama was painted around here somewhere, but maybe not in a big wooden building, built for the purpose, on the extreme outskirts of town, as described.

Common misconceptions about John Banvard

The Machinery

   The apparatus above is sometimes described as a system of grommets that Banvard patented, to prevent his picture from sagging. It looks like grommets, but the Scientific American article explains it’s pairs of pulley wheels, and a cord or rope is sewn to the top of the picture. Patents now list the inventor’s address, so I hunted for it, and got the article, looking for a lead to the Louisville studio. There wasn’t any patent in the likely classes of such an invention, or any mention of a patent in any other account. Patent classes can be misleading though--it’s a language of nouns. It not a matter of what an invention does, what the purpose is, but what the thing is, so it could wind up in an unexpected place, having nothing to do with panoramas, stage equipment, or anything like that.  A patent in 1870 by L. Finger, (really) the lone item in the class for “Panoramas” doesn’t cite any previous patents it improves on, and is an electromagnetic powered means.  I can’t say for certain it was never patented, and the article looks exactly like a patent application at that time, but I searched enough to seriously doubt any U.S. patent exists, and more than enough to notice they didn’t publish inventor’s addresses, anyway, back then.

How big was it?

The Mississippi panorama was known as the “3 mile painting” but was 3 miles in square feet. Twelve feet high, by 440 yards--a quarter of a mile long. Note to Louisvillians--If you start at the upper entrance to Tyler Park, walk down to the steps under Baxter, and go around the path back to  the start of the loop, that’s how long Banvard’s painting was in it’s original version. I want to correct a few recent errors, popular misconceptions, about this.   

     A Courier-Journal nostalgia feature, Aug. 5, 1979, by  Jean Howerton Coady is the first place I noticed anyone saying it was four feet high, depicting it with a woodcut image--another wild distortion, typical of their liberal bias, I suppose.  The Encyclopedia of Louisville entry for painting, by John Franklin Martin, also gives the height as four feet. (Both give the 3-mile linear length at face value, though no scholarship source accepts it.) At that rate the leviathan  picture, wonder of the world, monument of the ages, is comically reduced, like the mini-Stonehenge set in Spinal Tap. To  correct the error with a firm source, I went back to the books I’d read, which had all seemed to agree on 12 feet, but then--like that plot twist where the hero retraces his steps, but things have been changed, the evidence covered up--the very first sentence in the preface to John Francis McDermott’s 1958 Lost Panoramas of the Mississippi seems to say that Banvard’s, and all the great panoramas, were four feet high. This sentence seems to be the source of the future errors:

“Five times during the 1840’s pictures were painted of the Mississippi River that measured from four hundred and forty yards up to twelve hundred and fifty in length by four in height. “

   This last dimension seems to refer particularly to Leon Pomerede’s four foot high panorama, but gives an impression that they  all were this height, and various lengths.

   The height difference is much bigger, in terms of imagining Banvard’s lost work, than the “three mile” boast about the length, and although the lengths can now only be guesstimated,  Banvard is generally given the title for being the first and most successful. It was big in the sense now applied to fame and renown. Joseph Earl Arrington’s Filson Club article in 1958 gives the height this way:

   “One observer found it to be ‘over ten feet wide,’ which may be twelve feet, a common height for other similar paintings.”

   There’s no firm source given for this common height, and while the ‘width’ of a roll of canvas seems to mean the height of the picture, it might mean the span between the rollers instead. John Hanners’ fabulous book “It was Play Or Starve” gives the height as twelve feet without bothering to demonstrate it with a source.  Paul Collins, on re-reading, doesn’t even mention the height, just the square feet.  I can’t find a single clear source or even a lead to follow to fix this. Nowhere in the many descriptions and reviews of the painting,--the one by Charles Dickens, or in any of the discussions and squabbles about how long the panoramas were can I find a single clear statement about how tall it was. In his novel Kavanaugh Longfellow describes his hopes for American literature in terms of Banvard’s great panorama, but we aren’t told how tall American literature ought to be.

  Any one of the thousands of people who saw this thing right in front of them could’ve simply said, by the way, it’s twelve feet high, as easily as a driver might signal a left turn. Nobody seems to have bothered, and I hate them. The whole 19th century lot of them, milling about in their stupid mutton chops and baleen hoop skirts, prattling on about the picture, how great it is, like you’re riding on a steamboat, blah blah, how their families are doing, the weather, their dull and pointless personal affairs, without ever confirming how high it was. As far as I’m concerned, they were a bunch of tiresome idiots. I’m glad they’re dead.

Young Banvard

There are errors in Banvard lore that are simply errors, and “errors” that served a promotional purpose (like the misleading “3-mile” boast) and may follow predictable patterns. This handbill seems to be an example of both. In 1830, before he was 15, and shortly before the Banvard family disaster that would fling him to Louisville, he had already set himself up as a young impresario, A typo in Arrington skips from the 4th to the 6th entertainment, which seems cute, and is repeated in more recent accounts, but it turns out John’s handbill had no such error.

   There’s something else though. The anonymous narrator of Banvard’s pamphlet Adventures of the Artist mentions the handbill for young Banvard’s Entertainments; how,  as a boy he saved pennies, not spending them on toys or sweetmeats, “and bought some types for a wooden printing press, of his own construction, and printed some handbills for his juvenile exhibitions. We have one of them now in our possession, and it is quite a genteel specimen of typography.” Okay, but, who is speaking? Who has this handbill?

    On the handbill of young Banvard’s Entertainments one finds in the family papers, pictured above, it says Printer, F. Woodworth, with an address on Pearl street. (The address of the entertainments seems to be the Woodworth house, which was on Center, according to one of Banvard’s boyhood sketches of the house, not the Banvard’s, which he says was at Broadway and Canal.) The “we” who has one of the handbills seems to be Banvard himself, slipping a little out of character.

    Samuel Woodworth was a poet, and a printer, and his nephew Francis was a printer as well. Why would a handbill printed on a press of his own construction advertise for another printer?  There might have been another handbill,  but it’s clear that Banvard wanted to stress and mythologize himself as acting alone, without any sort of help. In his early accounts he came to Louisville alone, as a boy, but in his memoirs he freely admits having a brother here--and Daniel and Jesse Banvard are listed at the same address in the city directory of 1832. The letter describing his Louisville studio is by Selim Woodworth, Samuel’s son, and is addressed to General Morris--not simply a General, a friend, but a family friend--the General George Morris who co-published the Home Journal, in New York, which published the Selim Woodworth letter, and the George Morris who would later write Samuel Woodworth’s biography. I think the Woodworth letter describing Banvard in his studio may have been more Banvard’s construction than the press that printed his handbills, or the building where he painted his panorama. I’m not sure of it, just proposing some doubt. It’s odd in the letter that Woodworth tells us Banvard’s feelings--how happy to see Woodworth, how sad to say goodbye--rather than his own. There’s a certain awkward, slightly comic staginess that seems familiar.

Banvard’s Adventures of the Artist

  A lot of the information about Banvard’s painting comes from his own accounts, which are promotional, have a certain absurd style, swarping between a first-person modesty and a third person grandeur. Sometimes it doesn’t make much sense. Like a pop song that must have seemed charming to someone, once, the search for Banvard’s studio became something profoundly annoying that was stuck in my head.

The demonstrable inaccuracies in Banvard’s 3rd person pamphlets follow a basic pattern of heroic adventure, playing up the difficulties he faced by the same proportion as they play down any assistance. He records that the Louisville gas company required a deposit of double the price of the gas fixtures to show the work. To raise the money he gave a society a a piece of equipment in exchange for their buying 50 tickets in advance --the apparatus being worth twice (my italics, this time) the price of the tickets. He ground his own colors, split wood for the next day. I find it hard to picture him managing the rolls himself, in his studio. Did he sew that cord along the top? Maybe he did all that--it’s not quite unbelievable.

Scholars tend to assume that Banvard wrote his own pamphlets, and it seems a reasonable assumption to make. (He certainly borrowed descriptions he liked, positive blurbs and responses, but however the text of his Adventures was arrived at, it sometimes reads like the worst fiction I’ve ever read; two books of stories so impossibly bad I naively suspected they might be brilliant. They couldn’t really be this awful, could they? One hyperbolic sentence after another, with each seeming to forget the implications and sense of the one before it. I threw those books out, and regret it, sometimes, searching for them online some nights, overcome with a sense of loss.) 

    John Banvard rarely showed any aversion to writing, eventually writing as many poems as Emily Dickenson, several plays, and his memoirs. Of all the the things he might’ve wanted help with, telling his story seems the last one he’d leave to anyone else. He tacitly admits authorship in the introduction to his “Adventures” when he begs pardon for speaking of himself, then promptly switches to an anonymous 3rd person. He ostensibly compiles his life from previously published accounts of it, rather than speaking of it directly. He’s beside himself with modesty in regard to his accomplishment. There’s an absurdly coy, hit-and-miss flashlight-beam omniscience, with a certain comedic effect.  For example, he can tell us—but only because there have been many inquiries, and at the suggestion of friends--what the young boy, John Banvard, dreamed, realized, and contemplated, and how the idea grew in his mind to produce the largest painting in the world. He can tell us that there mingled no idea of profit in this boy’s ambition—though I’m not sure who grudges him a little mingled idea of profit. But we do not know what this boy was in his waking, working moments, nor, strange to say, can we speak of “any aspirations he may have felt after artistic excellence.” No wait. Wait—one version actually pauses here at this spot, and guesses what he did in his waking, working moments—

“probably a mechanic.” 

Aaaaaaaah.

    Dear reader,  I don’t know what you do for fun-- whether you enjoy gardening, pro sports of one sort or another, or under the general rubric of ball, whether you like Woody Allen movies, or Inuit action-pictures like The Fast Runner, long walks, cross-stitching, X-treme sports, restoring El Caminos to their original beauty, camping, playing Guitar Hero I on a Playstation II, whether you ever followed the Grateful Dead, or bungee-jump, or re-enact the Civil War,  fish, or merely pretend to be fishing, sing in a Barbershop Quartet, or whatever consenting adults may do privately without hurting anyone long after the wild heyday of hickeys has past. But for me, finding that variation, with that line, probably a mechanic, made my day. It didn’t help me determine anything, at all, it’s a useless minor variation of the same basic story. But it is funny.

    It’s  kind of fun to look at old newspapers, maps, and city directories, playing detective. Sometimes you find a detail, something nobody else knows. That’s pretty cool, for a few seconds,  then you have look around for someone who wants to know it. The part of Banvard’s story I keep forgetting is that people lost  interest a long time ago. That’s a pretty big part of the story.

This letter by Selim Woodworth is the main source of information about the studio where John Banvard painted his Mississippi panorama in Louisville.

St.Louis, April 13, 1846

“My Dear General:--Here I am, in this beautiful city of St. Louis, and thus far ‘on my winding way’ to Oregon and California. In coming down the Ohio, our boat being of the larger class, and the river at a ‘low stage,’ we were detained several hours at Louisville, and I took advantage of the detention to pay a visit to an old school-mate of mine, one of the master spirits of the age. I mean Banvard, the artist, who is engaged in the herculean task of painting a panorama of the Mississippi river, upon more than three miles of canvas!--truthfully depicting a range of scenery of upwards of two thousand miles in extent. In company with a traveling aquaintance, an English gentleman, I called at the artist’s studio, an immense wooden building, constructed expressly for the purpose, at the extreme outskirts of the city. After knocking several times, I at length succeeded in making myself heard, when the artist himself, in his working cap and blouse, palette and pencil in hand, came to the door to admit us. He did not at first recognise me, but when I mentioned my name, he dropped both palette and pencil, and clasped me in his arms, so delighted was he to see me, after a separation of sixteen years.

     “My fellow-traveller was quite astonished at this sudden manifestation, for I had not informed him of our previous intimacy, but had merely invited him to accompany me to see in progress this wonder of the world, that is to be, this leviathan panorama. Banvard immediately conducted us into the interior of the building. He said he had selected the site for his building, far removed from the noise and bustle of the town, so that he might apply himself more closely and uninterruptedly to his labour, and be free from the intrusion of visitors. Within the studio, all seemed chaos and confusion, but the life-like and natural appearance of a portion of his great picture, displayed on one of the walls in a yet unfinished state. Here and there were scattered about the floor, piles of his original sketches, bales of canvas, and heaps of boxes. Paint pots, brushes, jars and kegs were strewed about, without order or arrangement, while along one of the walls several large cases were piled on, containing rolls of finished sections of the painting. On the opposite wall was spread a canvas, extending its whole length, upon which the artist was then at work. A portion of this canvas was wound upon an upright roller, or drum, standing at one end of the building, and as the artist completed his painting he thus disposed of it. Not having the time to spare, I could not stay to have all these immense cylinders unrolled for our inspection, for we were sufficiently occupied in examining that portion on which the artist is now engaged, and which is nearly completed, being from the mouth of the Red river to Grand Gulf.  Any description of this gigantic undertaking that I should attempt in a letter, would convey but a faint idea of what it will be when completed. The remarkable truthfulness of the minutest objects upon the shores of the rivers, independent of the masterly style and artistic execution of the work, will make it the most valuable historical painting in the world, and unequalled, for magnetude and variety of interest, by any work that has ever been heard of since the art of painting was discovered. As a medium for the study of geography of this portion of our country, it will be of inestimable value. The manners and customs of the aborigines and settlers--the modes of cultivating and harvesting the peculiar crops--cotton, sugar, tobacco, &c.--the shipping of the produce, in all the variety of novel and curious conveyances employed on these rivers for transportation, are here so vividly portrayed, that but a slight stretch of the imagination would bring the noise of the puffing steamboats from the river and the songs of the negroes in the fields, in music to the ear, and one seems to inhale the very atmosphere before him. Such were the impressions produced by our slight and unfavourable view of a portion of this great picture, which Banvard expects to finish this summer. It will be exhibited in New York in the autumn--after which, it will be sent to London, for the same purpose. The mode of exhibiting it is ingenious, and will require considerable machinery. It will be placed upon upright revolving cylinders, and the canvas will pass gradually before the spectator, thus affording the artist an opportunity of explaining the whole work. After examining many other beautiful specimens of the artist’s skill, which adorned his studio, we dined together in the city. As our boat was now ready to start, I shook hands with Banvard, who parted from me with feelings as sad as they had been before joyful. His life has been one of curious interest, replete with stirring incidents, and I was greatly amused in listening to anecdotes of his adventures on these western rivers, where, for many years past, he has been a constant sojourner, indefatigably employed in preparing his great work.

                                                                                                        Woodworth.”

  The day after the date of this letter, on April 14th 1846,  the Donner party set out from Springfield, Il. Selim Woodworth  would lead a rescue effort, and is generally remembered as a drunk, a braggart, a no-show, and an idler, having his feet rubbed while people were freezing and starving to death. Some accused him of selling relief supplies for personal gain. (Other accounts of him, in later service at sea, are considerably more positive.) Woodworth was the first inhabitant of Red Rock Island in the San Fransisco bay, called “Treasure Island” --not to be confused with the man-made island that was developed later. Thanks, Selim. The one time I try to tell a story straight, check all the facts, it turns out to involve cannibalism and pirate treasure.

The old oaken bucket

   Selim’s father, Samuel Woodworth was the author of The Old Oaken Bucket” --which some say might be the most popular poem by an American. The poem remembers Woodworth’s boyhood home, and the old oaken bucket at the well. The first stanza:

How dear to this heart are the scenes of my childhood,

When fond recollection presents them to view!

The orchard, the meadow, the deep-tangled wild-wood,

And every loved spot which my infancy knew!

The wide-spreading pond, and the mill that stood by it,

The bridge, and the rock where the cataract fell,

The cot of my father, the dairy-house nigh it,

And e’en the rude bucket that hung in the well-

The old oaken bucket, the iron-bound bucket,

The moss-covered bucket which hung in the well.

   The Old Oaken Bucket was set to music, memorized by generations of schoolchildren,  and parodied in comic variations, wickedly undercutting the sentimental tone with the kittens we drowned in the well, the family toothbrush that hung on the wall, father “kicking the bucket” and falling in the well and drowning, and so on.  Woodworth’s bucket lent its name to a trophy that has been awarded since 1925 to the winner of the Big Ten Conference college football game between Purdue University and Indiana University. Woodworth wasn’t from Indiana, his boyhood home in Scituate, Massachusetts is a registered historic place, but the trophy exemplifies the sentiment that the people of Indiana have for their home state. Since I can’t find where the studio was, that’s an idea. If I can’t find a place that may not have been there, maybe I’m looking for another place that is, and was.

     Although his  great work is gone, Banvard’s  story is still striking, and it touches live wires in popular culture. It’s an auspicious rags to riches, and a riches to rags tale--both the kinds of stories people often draw life-lessons from, both still matter, inspire, and warn us. Several times when I’ve mentioned Banvard to people they are sure they know all about it. No, they’ve never heard of Banvard or his career before, but they know about things like that, and how they go. One was sure the painting still exists, and will turn up on Antiques Roadshow or something. Others know that if Banvard was a good painter, he’d be remembered. Because that’s how things are.

   It was a documentary form, and a one-man reality show--invoking feelings of fairness, just rewards, just desserts, that are still popular. The Apprentice,  Survivor, American Idol, American Inventor, Oprah’s Big Give, Who Wants to Marry a Fifth Grader, and Extreme Home Makeover--these play on much the same principles in popular mythology.  Banvard tells us that no thought of profit mingled in his boyhood ambition. Cordelia in Lear comes to mind. Hamlet, in a bad mood, says if we get what we deserve we’ll be whipped. In the popular imagination Darwin seems to say that might makes right, nothing succeeds like success--though obviously that sort of notion is a little older than Darwin. 

the ends

John was the baby of eleven children, and came to Louisville as a boy of 15, in 1831. His father’s business partner had disappeared with the company’s money, and John’s father died of a stroke. In his pamphlets Banvard said he was alone, a penniless boy striking out for the west, but in his later years, after his star had fallen and he was living in Waterton, in the Dakota Territories, his memoirs freely mention his brother Daniel was in Louisville. Daniel was a grocer on Water street, along the river, and he and another brother, Jesse, lived on what’s now Armory, near Liberty, downtown, near Louisville Gardens. In his memoirs he spoke in a plainer voice, more directly, and with nothing to sell. Sometimes he sounds like he’s sitting in the room talking to you.

In Louisville  (ca. 1831-32)

In the street opposite “Longhorn’s”,  auction sales of slaves would sometimes take place. One of these sales came off shortly after I engaged at the drug store and when for the first time I saw men and women sold at auction to the first bidder. After one negro had been knocked off, he refused to leave the block he said “massa auctioneer” might sell him over for he would not go with the man that had bought him, whom he appeared to well know. He was told to get down from the block, but insisted on being sold over to someone else, and refused to descend. Someone in attendance took hold of him and attempted to pull him down. “No I will not go with him he is a hard master and please sell me to someone else for I will not go with him; I don’t want him for my massa”,  Get down cried the auctioneer. NO please sell me again. At this time the man who had purchased him came up and jerked him off the block. I will not go with you I’ll die first and right here, the slave said. Another man came to the purchasers assistance and took hold of the negro who still refused to go with his new master. The two white men tried to drag  him along as the negro sat on the ground. His master now procured a horsewhip and commenced whipping him who took the server’s castigation still saying he would not go. The white men dragged him away from the block as he was delaying the sale as a number of slaves men and women were to be sold. The negro lay down in the street and such blows as were rained down on him by his new master I never saw given to a brute. The other slaves waiting to be sold looked on in the deepest sorrow and among the women might have been his wife, but this I don’t remember. The poor objecting slave was dragged away by several white men who came to the purchasers assistance, who would leave him at intervals lieing in the street while his master applied the horsewhip. The slave said constantly, “you may kill me but I wont go”. However he was dragged away and what was the finished result I never learned. This was the first of the public working of slavery I had seen.

He sounds like someone who saw a man being sold. I believe him, and have an easier time imagining this moment of his life than some others relating to his remarkable achievements.

Banvard kept writing to the end of his life, and even put on elaborate productions--where the population was so sparse there was no hope  of a profitable audience no matter what he did. Paul Collins notes that his grave reads:

                                      JOHN BANVARD

                                             Born

                                      Nov. 15, 1815

                                             Died

                                      May 16, 1891

There’s one mistake in his story about this slave--”Longhorn’s” was Langhorne’s, a hotel on Main street, near Fifth. It was somewhere near where the Kentucky Center for the Arts is today, on the opposite side. I’d put a marker there for Banvard. It’s near the river, and is a place where performances still come and go. He was there. It’s close enough.

John Banvard

Banvard’s Folly: thirteen tales of people who didn’t change the world, Paul Collins

The Lost Panoramas of the Mississippi, John Francis McDermott

“It Was Play or Starve,”  John Hanners

John Banvard’s Moving Panorama of the Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio Rivers, Joseph Earl Arrington

Description of Banvard’s Geographical Painting of the Mississippi River, John Banvard, The Cornell University Library

The Encyclopedia of Louisville,” John E. Kleber, University Press of Kentucky,  Painting entry by John Franklin Martin

Manon Porter, “Ancestor of the Movies.” Courier Journal Magazine, Jan 20, 1957

The Panorama : History of a Mass Medium, Stephan Oetterman

History, like a vast river, propels logs, vegetation, rafts, and debris; it is full of dead things, some destined for resurrection; it mingles many waters and holds in solution invisible substances stolen from distant soils. Anything may become part of it; that is why it can be an image of the continuity of mankind. And it is also why some of its freight turns up again in the social sciences: they were constructed out of the contents of history in the same way as houses in medieval Rome were made out of stones taken from the coliseum. But the special sciences based on sorted facts cannot be mistaken for rivers flowing in time and full of persons and events. They are systems fashioned with concepts numbers, and abstract relations. For history, the reward of eluding method is to escape abstraction.

Jaques Barzun

The most exciting part of a mystery usually isn’t the solution, but the point at which many different explanations are all in the air at once. No one answer is likely to be quite as much like life as that ambiguity is, by itself. When we run out of clues, and still have no answer, the mystery is more an enigma. We’re thrown back on the ways we understand the here and now.

Kentucky is not very well known as the birthplace of the world’s largest painting, and Louisville isn’t often thought of as the place where John Banvard began his triumphant, doomed career. There’s a little shelf of books, scholarly articles, newspaper accounts, a mention in 1990s Guinness Record books, but nothing remotely like the notoriety of the Kentucky Derby, KFC, Muhammad Ali, the origin of the song Happy Birthday, Kaelin’s claim to have invented the cheeseburger—there’s not even one of those historical markers we have around town remembering such things as the birth of truth-in-advertising law, or the spot downtown near 4th Street Live! where Thomas Merton was standing when he had an epiphany about his love for all people--and where I was standing, suddenly realizing that people get on my nerves, when I saw the Merton marker.

  The Apollo Rooms

I did find where Banvard first showed the panorama, at the Apollo Rooms--upstairs, on the east side of third street, somewhere between where the E-on building is now, and the backside of the Old Spaghetti Factory. Opening night was a Monday evening, 8:15 pm, June 29, 1846. It rained, and nobody came. But he passed out tickets to boatmen who could vouch for its accuracy, and soon built up a packed house. People came distances to see it, extra  trains were run to bring crowds. Then he moved on, to cities back east, to Europe, and Windsor Castle, which he would built a replica of on a sixty acre lot on Long Island.

It was hard to find the Apollo Rooms,  coordinating it from various references, directions to and among other addresses. Knowing where it was didn’t quite hit the spot. Maybe even if I could find the studio, it wouldn’t scratch the mental itch I feel, looking for it.

  Pop Songs that annoyed me while I was looking for the Louisville studio

  With all due respect to Procol Harum, “a whiter shade of pale” is a tint.  I think what Linda Ronstadt meant to say is that she and I travel, in our separate, and ultimately irreconcilable ways, to the beats of different drums, not together, with a bond of shared eccentricity, to the beat of a different drum. At least she ain’t saying I ain’t pretty. It’s not clear to me what distinction Billy Joel makes by saying that we didn’t start the fire, but we did ignite it. When we tried to fight it.

Stupid people bustling around on Main Street, Louisville,  in the 1840s. They were idiots.

Banvard’s failed museum later became the great Daly’s Theatre

  The short explanation of what happened to Banvard is that he built a grand museum in New York, got into competition with P.T. Barnum, and things went bad. One might be tempted to draw various morals from the story, but what I like is that you can draw whichever one you happen to like. It’s one size fits all.  Pride goes before a fall, or, since Barnum’s theatre was more hokum and hype than Banvard’s, the sad familiar triumph of hype over substance. Banvard’s perseverance and industry paid off, but something like the same dogged determination kept him in the game until he lost everything again, trying to keep his museum going. He had never registered the stock, and his backers lost everything. At one point he plagiarized a drama by a living playwright, got caught, and had to close the production. His ethical failings coincide with his failure, but if he had been able to engage audiences, it probably wouldn’t have mattered, or ever come to that. Whether he understood what he was doing by failing to register his museum or not, he would certainly have known that losing his investor’s money would ruin him and his reputation. I think he was honest by disposition, but he was a 19th century showman, and he was at his most honest when it was in his interest. Barnum may have been less honest, or it might be better to say he had a different contract with his audience, forged a different understanding. Banvard had the Cardiff giant--a famous fake. Barnum had a fake of the fake. At one point the courts ruled Barnum couldn’t be sued for calling a fake fake a fake. Struggling with his museum, Banvard was reduced to trying to sell it to Barnum, who emphatically declined by postcard.

In the nineteen eighties there used to be a t.v. show called Friday the 13th, set in an antique store, and every week there was a mystery that turned out to involve some particular object in the shop. But I don’t think the people in the show ever noticed this pattern occurring in their lives. When a new mystery cropped up, nobody said “Well, I wonder if it has something to do with one of these antiques here in the store? You know, like all the other mysteries have?   It might save us some running around, if we, like, started with that.” Popular culture is kind of funny like that--mysterious forces are at work, but they work with a certain predictability.

  It sounds to me as though the printed word had a different authority about it, and people indulged in its possibilities for heightened representation. People still do, but it’s different, a different  understanding, a social agreement, like the way we understand that a restaurant is a public place, but with certain terms and expectations of privacy. We are not there with the people at the next table, and there are boundaries. So, panoramists made exaggerated claims about the size of their pictures--they all did--and nobody seemed to mind. It might have helped draw the audience to see it, but once there, about two hours showing was plenty. P.T. Barnum is said to have put a sign up in his museum “This way to the egress” --banking that people would move along to see that strange creature--which of course was the exit, allowing him to keep the line moving.

   I picture an egress as a cross between a dodo and an emu.

   Jaws was the movie that gave us the word “blockbuster,” and it was accidental, but effective, that we rarely saw the shark. The mechanical shark didn’t work. There’s a fluky connection between horror and comedy, and when Spielberg first heard the famous Jaws theme, he thought it was a joke. Jaws is being re-released with cgi footage, and the improvised scene about the U.S.S. Indianapolis deleted. It’s impossible to say whether this “improved” version would have been more effective.

  Banvard’s Panorama depicted a geography onto which dreams were projected, and also fears. A decade later, in the Civil War years, panoramas were parodied and laughed at. As travel became easier, paths west were paved, the second-hand adventure of pretending to travel probably diminished in several dimensions.

J.P.  Frankenstein sketched Banvard in 1836. The Frankenstein family was important in establishing the arts in Cincinatti.

While I was trying to find Banvard’s studio, at some point I drove my mother to Grayson, in Carter County, where my grandmother’s house used to be. The house and yard I remembered were gone. There was was no shape to anything, no trees, no yard, that corresponded to my memory of the place. Just an overgrown field, and it felt like we could be anywhere. It was disconcerting but I mainly felt sorry for my mother. I grew up in a suburb, so I was used to it.

  As a child when I used to wake up in my grandmother’s house, I knew where I was by a particular sound, a burnished hush of voices talking in the kitchen, grown-up conversation I couldn’t quite hear or follow. Dishes, chairs, clinkings, some sounds you could recognize and others you’d never know the meaning of.  It was a very particular tone and energy agreed on over years by the grown-ups sitting long over breakfast at the kitchen table. It had something like the quality of practiced hands operating a bible, laying the marker ribbon with slow care, turning the pages with the flat of the fingers and palm, instead of just picking at an upper corner.

It was always that way, that collective sound, like nothing anywhere else, with its distinct pacing, and a range that didn’t, for example, forbid laughter, but circumscribed it to a range, like a dog on a leash. The dog of grown up laughter was allowed to trot, with an almost purposeful look on its face to the end of a line, and back,  outside, yet included, by imagining it is guarding us. The voices seemed to be woven around an unspoken matter-at-hand--as if some strange object was sitting on the table, under discussion. It sounded almost like something was being plotted. My mother’s family was mostly early-rising, and polite. I suppose they were up plotting civilization, while the kids slept in a little longer. That’s how I knew where I was--that unspoken agreement among voices speaking, something variable, yet distinct, and something I can’t imagine could ever be reproduced, anywhere else.

     Outside my grandmother’s kitchen window there had been a pear tree I’d climb, and eat the pears. I made up my mind I liked pears, and always asked for them, all kinds, but they were never quite what I wanted, though some were closer than others. I was on a pear quest maybe ten years. The difference wasn’t a trick of memory, nostalgia, or fresh picked goodness. In my twenties I found pear apples, also called Asian pears, in a grocery store. That was it. It was that kind of pear tree. Round, golden skinned, white water crispy, and bitter at the core. That’s what I was looking for.

Many of the most popular entertainments seem to involve confronting the future, and trying to predict it. Sports, games, performance of music or other skilled acts, these all propose a future outcome to be determined. Skills or actions are directed toward an end. Plato believed music didn’t imitate anything, but it seems to imitate the will working toward an end. If it doesn’t represent anything to us, if we aren’t engaged, it’s sound, but not music. Fixed entertainments, with no live play, like a book, object, picture, or film, only remember or imitate a progress into a future, and they tend to be less popular--maybe. Movies imitate live action pretty well. The lowest form of drama is simply a fixed game, our hero or team wins, because, well, that’s how we want it. Henri Bergson found comedy in someone walking, and falling down, but not if the person simply decides to sit down. He called it “something mechanical inlaid upon the human.” I think it’s more a disappointed projection into the future.

   For Banvard’s audiences his panorama of the west was compelling, for a while, but as the west was better known, it became silly. If one wanted to see the west, they would go. With his museum, he had trouble engaging an audience in a popular way.