Paul Collins - Banvards Folly

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BANVARD'S FOLLY Thirteen Tales of Renowned Obscurity, Famous Anonymity, and

Rotten Luck

by PAUL COLLINS

The historical record crowns success. Those enshrined in its annals are men

and women whose ideas, accomplishments, or personalities have dominated,

endured, and, most important of all, found champions. John F. Kennedy's

Profiles in Courage, Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists, and Samuel

Johnson's Lives of the Poets are classic celebrations of the greatest, the

brightest, the eternally constellated.

Paul Collins's Banvard's Folly is a different kind of book. Here are thirteen

unforgettable portraits of forgotten people: men and women who might have

claimed their share of renown but who, whether from ill timing, skulduggery,

monomania, the tinge of madness, or plain bad luck--or perhaps some

combination of them all--leapt straight from life into thankless obscurity.

Among their number are scientists, artists, writers, entrepreneurs, and

adventurers, from across the centuries and around the world. They hold in

common the silenced aftermath of failure, the name that rings no bells.

Collins brings them back to glorious life. John Banvard was an artist whose

colossal panoramic canvases (one behemoth depiction of the entire eastern

shore of the Mississippi River was simply known as "The Three-Mile Painting")

made him the richest and most famous artist of his day ... before he decided

to go head-to-head with P. T. Barnum. Ren`e Blondlot was a distinguished

French physicist whose celebrated discovery of a new form of radiation, called

the n-ray, went terribly awry. At the tender age of seventeen, William Henry

Ireland signed "William Shakespeare" to a book and launched a short but

meteoric career as a forger of undiscovered works by the Bard--until he pushed

his luck too far. John Symmes, a hero of the War of 1812, nearly succeeded in

convincing Congress to fund an expedition to the North Pole, where he intended

to prove his theory that the earth was hollow and ripe for exploitation; his

quixotic quest counted Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe among its greatest

admirers.

Collins's love for what he calls the "forgotten ephemera of genius" gives his

portraits of these figures and the other nine men and women in Banvard's Folly

sympathetic depth and poignant relevance. Their effect is not to make us sneer

or revel in schadenfreude; here are no cautionary tales. Rather, here are

brief introductions--acts of excavation and reclamation--to people history may

have forgotten, but whose claim on our imagination is now secure.

Published by: Picador (R) USA, New York, N.y.

"No writer better articulates our interest in the confluence of hope,

eccentricity, and the timelessness of the bold and strange than Paul Collins.

His style is clean and his tone unerring. This book, which is very

straightforward about very odd things, is funny and very warm--and may even be

inspirational." --Dave Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering

Genius

"Though the most profound question is "What is the meaning of life?"' the

most human question is "Don't they know how special I am?"' Paul Collins

knows. Thanks to these fascinating tales, his forgotten attention-seekers must

be rolling over in their graves, if only to finally bask in the limelight."

--Sarah Vowell, author of Take the Cannoli

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Paul Collins writes for McSweeney's, and his work has also appeared in

eCompany Now and Lingua Franca. While writing this book, he lived in San

Francisco, where he taught early American literature at Dominican University.

He recently moved with his family to rural Wales, where he is now completing

his next book.

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO MY

PREDECESSORS:

Van Wyck Brooks Isaac D'israeli Stewart Holbrook Edmund Pearson

AND TO ANY PUBLISHER WHO WILL PUT THEIR WORKS BACK IN PRINT.

HAVE YOU HEARD THAT IT WAS GOOD

TO GAIN THE DAY? I ALSO SAY IT IS GOOD TO FALL,

BATTLES ARE LOST IN THE SAME SPIRIT IN WHICH THEY ARE

WON ....

VIVAS TO THOSE WHO HAVE FAIL'D! AND TO THOSE WHOSE WAR-VESSELS SANK

IN THE SEA! AND TO THOSE THEMSELVES WHO SANK IN THE

SEA! AND TO ALL GENERALS THAT LOST

ENGAGEMENTS, AND ALL OVERCOME HEROES! AND THE NUMBERLESS UNKNOWN HEROES

EQUAL TO THE GREATEST HEROES KNOWN! --Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"

CONTENTS

Preface

1. BANVARD'S FOLLY

2. THE CLEVER DULLARD

3. SYMMES HOLE

4. THE MAN WITH n-Ray EYES

5. IF ONLY GENIUSES KNEW HOW TO SCHEME

6. 22,000 SEEDLINGS

7. PSALMANAZAR

8. THE PNEUMATIC UNDERGROUND

9. HE BEING DEAD YET SPEAKETH NOT

10. A DEDICATED AMATEUR OF FASHION

11. A. J. PLEASONTON'S BLUE LIGHT SPECIAL

12. YOUR GLORIOUS DAY IS COMING

13. WALKING ON THE RINGS OF SATURN

Further Readings

Acknowledgments

PREFACE

Peruse the documents of any era-newspapers, bills of sale, wills--and you

find nothing but forgotten names. A famous name brings an almost electric

shock of recognition, that in these crowds of nobodies and

once-were-somebodies is a person you can attach a face and a reputation to.

The collector and the historian value those rare documents. But I always find

myself wondering about the other people. And buried in these footnotes of

history are brilliant, fatally flawed thinkers who rose to dizzying heights of

intellect and even fame, only to come crashing down into disaster, ridicule,

or just the utter silence of oblivion.

Occasionally, I find others who share my predilection for the forgotten

ephemera of genius. There's the Dead Media web site, devoted to "the numerous

experiments that died on the barbed wire of technological advance. The Edison

kinetophone. Gaumont's Chronophone. The synchronoscope. The movietone.

Phonofilm. The graphophonoscope. The vitaphone ..." There are fellow

antiquarians like Edmund Pearson and Van Wyck Brooks, whose books I can

scarcely open without feeling the need to give the secret handshake for the

Universal Brotherhood of Collectors of Obscurity. And there's my old college

roommate, Shawn Lani, now the senior exhibit designer at the Exploratorium in

San Francisco. He contracted a collector's mania for household

photos--anonymous black-and-white photographs from yard sales or old wire

service archives, many lacking a date or even a name, but occasionally

capturing a serendipitous genius in their composition. We are all curators at

heart, I suppose, of items that we fear no one else will have time for.

Why write about such things?--you may ask.

And if it's not you, surely someone will ask this question. Despite our being

a nation of moralists, the only real sin in America is that of failure. The

man or woman of promise who has nothing but excuses and regrets to offer at

the end of the day --these people we do worse than despise. We avert our gaze

and excuse ourselves from their presence.

And why not? We are also a nation of successes. This, at least, is what every

demagogue, advertiser, and con artist tells us. We want to believe that we are

good people, and that opportunity is there for those with the spirit to

achieve it. Yet we laud men and women who have no better quality than the

possession of money, and who achieve their success on the backs of the

swindled and disdained. We want to believe that there is something more to

their success than mere greed and luck. Even more than a moral loser, we

cannot bear the thought of an immoral success.

There are moral successes, of course. But for each person credited with a

winning innovation, there are the losers who pursued a similar path to

failure. Perhaps their timing was wrong. Maybe they lacked the ruthless force

of personality that propels the winners of history. In the end, they might

even have been undone by weaknesses in character that had little to do with

the merits of their ideas.

And so I began this book, an account of those who have fallen in their

pursuits. Whole books could be unearthed on each of their lives--and I hope

that happens someday. But for now, these excavations may suffice.

BANVARD'S FOLLY

Mister Banvard has done more to elevate the taste for fine arts, among those

who little thought on these subjects, than any single artist since the

discovery of painting and much praise is due him. --The Times of London

The life of John Banvard is the most perfect crystallization of loss

imaginable. In the 1850's, Banvard was the most famous living painter in the

world, and possibly the first millionaire artist in history. Acclaimed by

millions and by such contemporaries as Dickens, Longfellow, and Queen

Victoria, his artistry, wealth, and stature all seemed unassailable.

Thirty-five years later, he was laid to rest in a pauper's grave in a lonely

frontier town in the Dakota Territory. His most famous works were destroyed,

and an examination of reference books will not turn up a single mention of his

name. John Banvard, the greatest artist of his time, has been utterly

obliterated by history.

What happened?

In 1830, a fifteen-year-old American schoolboy passed out this handbill to

his classmates, complete with its homely omission of a 5th entertainment:

BANVARD'S ENTERTAINMENTS (to be seen at No. 68 Centre street, between White

and Walker.) Consisting of 1/. Solar Microscope 2nd. Camera Obscura 3rd. Punch

and Judy 4th. Sea Scene 6th. Magic Lantern Admittance (to see the whole) six

cents. The following are the days of performance, viz: Mondays, Thursdays, and

Saturdays. Performance to commence at half-past 3 P.m. JOHN BANVARD,

Proprietor

Although his classmates were not to know, they were only the first of more

than two million to witness the showmanship of John Banvard. Visiting

Banvard's home museum and diorama in Manhattan, they might have been greeted

by his father, Daniel, a successful building contractor and a dabbler in art

himself. His adventurous son had acquired a taste for sketching, writing, and

science--the latter pursuit beginning with a bang when an experiment with

hydrogen exploded in the young man's face, badly injuring his eyes.

Worse calamities lay in store. When Daniel Banvard suffered a stroke in 1831,

his business partner fled with the firm's assets. Daniel's subsequent death

left the family bankrupt. After watching his family's possessions auctioned

off, John lit out for the territories--or at least for Kentucky. Taking up

residence in Louisville as a drugstore clerk, he honed his artistic skills by

drawing chalk caricatures of customers in the back of the store. His boss, not

interested in patronizing adolescent art, fired him. Banvard soon found

himself scrounging for signposting and portrait jobs on the docks.

It was here that he met William Chapman, the owner of the country's first

showboat. Chapman offered Banvard work as a scene painter. The craft itself

was primitive by the standards of later showboats, as Banvard later recalled:

The boat was not very large, and if the audience collected too much on one

side, the water would intrude over the low gunwales into their exhibition

room. This kept the company by turns in the un-artist-like employment of

pumping, to keep the boat from sinking. Sometimes the swells from a passing

steamer would cause the water to rush through the cracks of the

weather-boarding, and give the audience a bathing .... They made no extra

charge for this part of the exhibition.

The pay proved to be equally unpredictable. But if nothing else, Chapman's

showboat gave Banvard ample practice in the rapid sketching and painting of

vast scenery--a skill that would eventually prove to be invaluable.

Deciding that he'd rather starve on his own payroll than on someone else's,

Banvard left the following season. He disembarked in New Harmony, Ohio, where

he set about assembling a theater company. Banvard himself would serve as an

actor, scene painter, and director; occasionally, he'd dash onstage to perform

as a magician. He funded the venture by suckering a backer out of his life

savings; this pattern of arts financing would haunt him later in life.

The river back then was still unspoiled--and unsafe. But the troupe did last

for two seasons, performing Shakespeare and popular plays while they floated

from port to port. Few towns could support their own theater, but they could

afford to splurge when the floating dramatists tied up at the dock. Customers

sometimes bartered their way aboard with chickens and sacks of potatoes, and

this helped fill in the many gaps in the troupe's menu. But eventually food,

money, and tempers ran so short that Banvard, broke and exhausted from bouts

with malarial ague, was reduced to begging on the docks of Paducah, Kentucky.

While Banvard was now a toughened showman with several years of experience, he

was also still a bright, intelligent, and sympathetic teenager. A local

impresario took pity on the bedraggled boy and hired him as a scene painter.

Banvard, relieved, quit the showboat.

It was a good thing that he did quit, for farther downriver a bloody knife

fight broke out between the desperate thespians. The law showed up in the form

of a hapless constable, who promptly stumbled through a trapdoor in the stage

and died of a broken neck. With a dead cop on their hands, the company

panicked and abandoned ship; Banvard never heard from any of them again.

While in Paducah, Banvard made his first attempts at crafting "moving

panoramas." The panorama--a circular artwork that surrounded the viewer--was a

relatively new invention, a clever use of perspective that emerged in the late

1700's. By 1800, it was declared an official art form by the Institut de

France. Photographic inventor L. J. Daguerre went on to pioneer the "diorama,"

which was a panorama of moving canvas panels viewed through atmospheric

effects. When Banvard was growing up in Manhattan, he could gape at these

continuous rolls of painted canvas depicting seaports and "A Trip to Niagara

Falls."

Moving into his twenties with the memories of his years of desperate illness

and hunger behind him, Banvard spent his spare time in Paducah painting

landscapes and creating his own moving panoramas of Venice and Jerusalem.

Stretched between two rollers and operated on one side by a crank, they

allowed audiences to stand in front and watch exotic scenery roll by. Banvard

could not stay away from the river for long, though. He began plying the

Mississippi, Ohio, and Missouri rivers again, working as a dry-goods trader

and an itinerant painter. He also had his eye on greater projects: a diorama

of the "infernal regions" had been touring the frontier successfully, and

Banvard thought he could improve upon it. During a stint in Louisville, he

executed a moving panorama that he described as "INFERNAL REGIONS, nearly 100

feet in length." He completed and sold this in 1841, and it came as a crowning

success atop the sale of his Venice and Jerusalem panoramas.

It is not easy to imagine the effect that panoramas had upon their viewers. It

was the birth of motion pictures--the first true marriage of the reality of

vision with the reality of physical movement. The public was enthralled, and

so was Banvard: he had the heady rush of an artist working at the dawn of a

new media. Emboldened by his early successes, the twenty-seven-year-old

painter began preparations for a painting so enormous and so absurdly

ambitious that it would dwarf any attempted before or since: a portrait of the

Mississippi River.

When we read of the frontier today, we are apt to envision California and

Nevada. In Banvard's time, though, "the frontier" still meant the Mississippi

River. A man setting off into its wilds and tributaries would only

occasionally find the friendly respite of a town; in between he faced

exposure, mosquitoes, and, if he ventured ashore, bears. But Banvard had been

up and down the river many times now, and had taken at least one trip solo as

a traveling salesman. The idylls of river life had charms and hazards, as he

later recalled:

All the toil, and its dangers, and exposure, and moving accidents of this

long and perilous voyage, are hidden, however, from the inhabitants, who

contemplate the boats floating by their dwellings and beautiful spring

mornings, when the verdant forest, the mild and delicious temperature of the

air, the delightful azure of the sky of this country, the fine bottom on one

hand, and the romantic bluff on the other, the broad and the smooth stream

rolling calmly down the forest, and floating the boat gently forward, present

delightful images and associations to the beholders. At this time, there is no

visible danger, or call for labor. The boat takes care of itself; and little

do the beholders imagine, how different a scene may be presented in half an

hour. Meantime, one of the hands scrapes a violin, and others dance.

Greetings, or rude defiances, or trials of wit, or proffers of love to the

girls on shore, or saucy messages, are scattered between them and the

spectators along the banks.

Banvard knew the physical challenge that he faced and was prepared for it.

But the challenge to his artistry was scarcely imaginable. In the spring of

1842, after buying a skiff, provisions, and a portmanteau full of pencils and

sketch pads, he set off down the Mississippi River. His goal was to sketch the

river from St. Louis all the way to New Orleans.

For the next two years, he spent his nights with his portmanteau as a pillow,

and his days gliding down the river, filling his sketch pads with river views.

Occasionally he'd pull into port to hawk cigars, meats, household goods, and

anything else he could sell to river folk. Banvard prospered at this, at one

point trading up to a larger boat so as to sell more goods. Recalling those

days to audiences a few years later--exercising his flair for drama, of

course, and referring to himself in the third person--he remembered the trying

times in between, when he was alone on the river:

His hands became hardened with constantly plying the oars, and his skin as

tawny as an Indian's, from exposure to the sun and the vicissitudes of the

weather. He would be weeks altogether without speaking to a human being,

having no other company than his rifle, which furnished him with his meat from

the game of the woods or the fowl of the river .... In the latter part of the

summer he reached New Orleans. The yellow fever was raging in that city, but

unmindful of that, he made his drawing of the place. The sun the while was so

intensely hot, that his skin became so burnt that it peeled from off the back

of his hands, and from his face. His eyes became inflamed by such constant and

extraordinary efforts, from which unhappy effects he has not recovered to this

day.

But in his unpublished autobiography, he recalled his travels a bit more

benignly:

[The river's current was] averaging from four to six miles per hour. So I

made fair progress along down the stream and began to fill my portfolio with

sketches of the river shores. At first it appeared lonesome to me drifting all

day in my little boat, but I finally got used to this.

By the time he arrived back in Louisville in 1844, this adventurer had

acquired the sketches, the tall tales, and the funds to realize his fantastic

vision of the river he had traveled. It would be the largest painting the

world had ever known.

Banvard was attempting to paint three thousand miles of the Mississippi from

its Missouri and Ohio sources. But if his project was grander than any before,

so were the ambitions of his era. Ralph Waldo Emerson, working the New England

public lecture circuit, had already lamented, "Our fisheries, our Negroes, and

Indians, our boasts ... the northern trade, the southern planting, the Western

clearing, Oregon, and Texas, are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our

eyes, its ample geography dazzles the imagination ...." The idea had been

voiced by novelists like Cooper before him, and later on by such poets as Walt

Whitman. When Banvard built a barn on the outskirts of Louisville in 1844 to

house the huge bolts of canvas that he had custom-ordered, he was sharing in

this grand vision of American art.

His first step was to devise a tracked system of grommets to keep the huge

panorama canvas from sagging. It was ingenious enough to be patented and

featured in a Scientific American article a few years later. And then, for

month after month, Banvard worked feverishly on his creation, painting in

broad strokes: trained in background painting, he specialized in conveying the

impression of vast landscapes. Looked at closely, this work held little for

the connoisseur trained in conventions of detail and perspective. But motion

worked magic upon the rough-hewn cabins, muddy banks, blooming cottonwoods,

frontier towns, and medicine-show flatboats.

During this time he also worked in town on odd jobs, but if he told anyone of

his own painting, we have no record of it. Fortunately, though, we have a

letter from an unexpected visitor to Banvard's barn. Lieutenant Selin

Woodworth had grown up a few houses away from Banvard and hadn't seen him in

sixteen years, and he could hardly pass by in the vast frontier without saying

hello. When he showed up unannounced at the barn, he was amazed by what

maturity had wrought in his childhood friend:

I called at the artist's studio, an immense wooden building .... The artist

himself, in his working cap and blouse, pallet and pencil in hand, came to the

door to admit us .... 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 .... A portion of this

canvas was wound upon a upright roller, or drum, standing on one end of the

building, and as the artist completes his painting he thus disposes of it.

Any description of this gigantic undertaking ... 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, and

artistical execution of the work will make it the most valuable historical

painting in the world, and unequaled for magnitude and variety of interest, by

any work that has been heard of since the art of painting was discovered.

This was the creation that Banvard was ready to unveil to the world.

Banvard approached his opening day with the highest of hopes. Residents

reading the Louisville Morning Courier discovered on June 29, 1846, that their

local painter had rented out a hall to show off his work: "Banvard's Grand

Moving Panorama of the Mississippi will open at the Apollo Rooms, on Monday

Evening, June 29, 1846, and continue every evening till Saturday, July 4." A

review in the same paper declared, "The great three-mile painting is destined

to be one of the most celebrated paintings of the age." Little did the writer

of this review know how true this first glimpse was to prove: for while it was

to be the most celebrated painting of the age, it did not last for the ages.

Opening night certainly proved to be inauspicious. Banvard paced around his

exhibition hall, waiting for the crowds and the fifty-cent admission fees to

come pouring in. Darkness slowly fell, and a rain settled in. The panorama

stood upon the lighted stage, fully wound and awaiting the first turn of the

crank. And as the sun set and rain drummed on the roof, John Banvard waited

and waited.

Not a single person showed up.

It was a humiliating debut, and it should have been enough to make him pack

up and leave. But the next day saw John Banvard move from being a genius of

artistry to a genius of promotion. He spent the morning of the 30th working

the Louisville docks, chatting to steamboat crews with the assured air of one

who'd navigated the river many times himself. Moving from boat to boat, he

passed out free tickets to a special afternoon matinee.

Even if they had paid the full fee, the sailors would have got their money's

worth that afternoon. As the painted landscape glided by behind him, Banvard

described his travels upon the river-a tall tale of pirates, colorful frontier

eccentrics, hairbreadth escapes, and wondrous vistas, a tad exaggerated,

perhaps, but it still convinced a hallful of sailors who could have punctured

his veracity with a single catcall. When he gave his evening performance, crew

recommendations to passengers boosted his take to $10--not bad for an

evening's work in 1846. With each performance the audience grew, and within a

few days he was playing to a packed house.

Flush with money and a successful debut, Banvard returned to his studio and

added more sections to the painting, and then he moved it to a larger venue.

The crowds continued to pour in, and nearby towns chartered steamboats to see

the show. With the added sections, the show stretched to over two hours in

length; the canvas would be cranked faster or slower depending on audience

response. Each performance was unique, even for a customer who sat through two

in a row. The canvas wasn't rewound at the end of the show, so the

performances alternated between upriver and downriver journeys.

After a successful shakedown cruise, Banvard was ready to take his "Three Mile

Painting" to the big city. He held his last Louisville show on October 31 and

then headed for the epicenter of American intellectual culture: Boston.

Banvard installed his panorama in Boston's Armory Hall in time for the

Christmas season. He had honed his delivery to a perfect blend of racy

improvisation, reminiscences, and tall tales about infamous frontier brigands.

The crank machinery was now hidden from the audience, and Banvard had

commissioned a series of piano waltzes by Thomas Bricher to accompany his

narration. With creative lighting and the unfurling American landscape behind

him, Banvard had created a seemingly perfect synthesis of media.

Audiences loved it. By Banvard's account, in six months 251,702 Bostonians

viewed his extraordinary show; at fifty cents a head, he'd made about $100,000

in clear profit. In just one year, he'd gone from modest frontier sign painter

to famous and wealthy man--and probably the country's richest artist. When he

published the biographical pamphlet Description of Banvard's Panorama of the

Mississippi River (1847) and a transcription of his show's music, The

Mississippi Waltzes, he made more money. But there was an even happier result

to his inclusion of piano music--the young pianist he'd hired to perform it,

Elizabeth Goodman, soon became his fiancee, and then his wife.

Accolades continued to pour in, culminating in a final Boston performance that

saw the governor, the speaker of the house, and state representatives in the

audience unanimously passing a resolution to honor Banvard. His success was

also the talk of Boston's intellectual elite. John Greenleaf Whittier titled a

book after it (The Panorama and Other Poems) in 1856, and Henry Wadsworth

Longfellow wrote about the Mississippi in his epic Evangeline after seeing one

of Banvard's first Boston performances. Longfellow had never seen the river

himself--to him, the painting was real enough to suffice. In fact, Longfellow

was to invoke Banvard again in his novel Kavanaugh, using him as the standard

by which future American literature was to be judged: "We want a national epic

that shall correspond to the size of the country; that shall be to all other

epics what Banvard's panorama of the Mississippi is to all other

paintings--the largest in the world."

There is little doubt that Banvard's "Three Mile Painting" was the longest

ever produced. But it was a misleading appellation. John Hanners --the scholar

who almost single-handedly has kept Banvard's memory alive in our time--points

out: "Banvard always carefully pointed out that others called it three miles

of canvas. ... The area in its original form was 15,840 square feet, not three

miles in linear measurement."

But perhaps Banvard was in no hurry to correct the public's inflated

perceptions of his painting. His fame was now preceding him, and he moved his

show to New York City in 1847 to even bigger crowds and greater enrichment; it

was hailed there as "a monument of native talent and American genius." Each

night's receipts were carted to the bank in locked strongboxes; rather than

count the massive deposits, the banks simply started weighing Banvard's haul.

With acclaim and riches came the less sincere flattery of his fellow artists.

The artist closest upon Banvard's heels was John Rowson Smith, who had painted

a supposed "Four Mile Painting." For all Banvard's tendencies toward

exaggeration, there is even less reason or evidence to believe that his

opportunistic rivals produced panoramas larger than his. Still, it was a

worrisome trend. Banvard had been hearing for some time of plans by

unscrupulous promoters to copy his painting and to then show the pirated work

in Europe as the "genuine Banvard panorama." With the United States success

behind him, Banvard closed his New York show and booked a passage to

Liverpool.

Banvard spent the summer of 1848 warming up for his London shows with short

runs in Liverpool, Manchester, and other smaller cities. In London, the

enormous Egyptian Hall was booked for his show. He began by suitably

impressing the denizens of Fleet Street papers with a special showing. "It is

impossible," the Morning Advertiser marveled, "to convey an adequate idea of

this magnificent [exhibition]." The London Observer was equally impressed in

its review of November 27, 1848: "This is truly an extraordinary work. We have

never seen a work ... so grand in its whole character." Banvard was rapidly

achieving a sort of artistic beatification in the press.

The crowds and the money flowed in yet again. But to truly bring in the

chattering classes, Banvard needed something that he'd never had in the United

States: the imprimatur of royalty. After much finagling and plotting by

Banvard, he was summoned to Windsor Castle on April 11, 1849, for a special

performance before Queen Victoria and the royal family. Banvard was already a

rich man, but royal approval could make the difference between being a mere

artistic showman and an officially respected painter. Banvard gave the

performance of his life, delivering his anecdotes in perfect combination with

his wife at the piano; at the end, when he gave his final bow to the family

assembled at St. George's Hall, Banvard knew that he had made it as an artist.

For the rest of his life, he was to look back upon this as his finest hour.

His panorama show was now a sensation, running for a solid twenty months in

London and drawing more than 600,000 spectators. An enlarged and embellished

reprint of his autobiographical pamphlet, now titled Banvard, or the

Adventures of an Artist (1849), also sold well to Londoners, and his show's

waltzes could be heard in many a parlor. He penetrated every level of society;

after attending one show, Charles Dickens wrote him in an admiring letter: "I

was in the highest degree interested and pleased by your picture." To the

other dwellers of this island nation, whose experience of sailing was often

that of stormy seas, Banvard offered the spice of frontier danger blended with

the honeyed idylls of riverboat life:

Certainly, there can be no comparison between the comfort of the passage from

Cincinnati to New Orleans in such a steamboat, and to a voyage at sea. The

barren and boundless expanse of waters soon tires upon every eye but a

seaman's. And then there are storms, and the necessity of fastening the

tables, and of holding onto something, to keep in bed. There is the

insupportable nausea of sea sickness, and there is danger. Here you are always

near the shore, always see green earth; can always eat, write and study,

undisturbed. You can always obtain cream, fowls, vegetables, fruit, fresh

meat, and wild game, in their season, from the shore.

Toward the end of these London shows, Banvard found himself increasingly

dogged by imitators--there were fifty competing panoramas in the 1849-50

season alone. In addition to suffering competition from longtime rival John

Rowson Smith, Banvard now had scurrilous accusations of plagiarism flung at

him by fellow expatriate portraitist George Caitlin, a jealous painter who had

"befriended" Banvard in order to borrow money. Banvard also found his shows

being set upon by the spies of his rivals, who hired art students to sit in

the audience and sketch his work as it rolled by.

We know that a form of art has permeated a culture when cheap imitations

appear, and even more so when parodies of these imitations emerge. There is a

long-forgotten work in this vein by American humorist Artemus Ward, which was

published posthumously as Artemus Ward, His Panorama (1869). Ward spent the

last years of his life working in London, and had probably attended some of

the numerous panoramic travelogues and travesties that darted about in

Banvard's wake. His panorama, as shown by illustrations of the supposed stage

(which, as often as not, is obscured by a faulty curtain), consists of a

discourse on San Francisco and Salt Lake City, often interrupted by crapulous

bits of tangential mumbling in small type:

If you should be dissatisfied with anything here tonight-I will admit you all

free in New Zealand--if you will come to me there for the orders.

This story hasn't anything to do with my Entertainment, I know--but one of the

principle features of my Entertainment is that it contains so many things that

don't have anything to do with it.

For ads reproduced in the book, Ward munificently assures his audiences that

his lecture hall has been lavishly equipped with "new doorknobs." But

Banvard's most serious rivals were not such bumblers, and so he had to swing

back into action. Locking himself in the studio again, he created another

Mississippi panorama. Where the first panorama had been a view of the eastern

bank, this new painting depicted the western bank. He then placed the London

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BANVARD'SFOLLYThirteenTalesofRenownedObscurity,FamousAnonymity,andRottenLuckbyPAULCOLLINSThehistoricalrecordcrownssuccess.Thoseenshrinedinitsannalsaremenandwomenwhoseideas,accomplishments,orpersonalitieshavedominated,endured,and,mostimportantofall,foundchampions.JohnF.Kennedy'sProfilesinCourage,Gior...

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Paul Collins - Banvards Folly

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