Panorama Man
In the mid-nineteenth century, before moving pictures had developed, giant moving panoramas were a popular form of entertainment. Consisting of colossal paintings on canvas that could be unrolled on a wooden framework and thus tell a story, they allowed people to experience exciting far-away places or events and often featured exotic locales or scenes of famous battles. With dramatic narration, some music, and clever lighting and effects, the panoramic experience came as close to a cinematic virtual reality show as was possible at the time.
One of the best-known panorama painters of the day was an American painter named John Banvard. He created, among other items, an enormous panorama with thirty-six scenes of the Mississippi River. After achieving huge success with it in the United States, he took it to Britain in 1848. The English then had a nearly boundless curiosity about wild and untamed America and its unimaginably huge open spaces, and they helped Banvard—whose painting purported to depict “three thousand miles” of scenery—temporarily become a rich man.
Risley knew John R. Smith from his days with the Rufus Welch circuses, for Smith prominently features in Welch’s newspaper advertisements dating back to January 1843 as the decorator and painter of backdrop scenes. Exactly who first painted a giant moving panorama of the Mississippi is not clear, but Banvard’s was first exhibited in London, and a scandal erupted when both the Smith-Risley and Banvard panoramas were displayed there in 1849.
Risley arrived in London from America around February 13, 1849, with Smith and a man called Henry S. Risley, who is not to be confused with Henry C. Risley, the professor’s son. Henry S. presumably had some familial relationship with the professor, but what, exactly, is unclear. He was, however, some sort of specialist in panoramas and apparently critical to their set-up. Professor Risley and Smith’s work appeared in London early March. It was billed as larger and grander and better in all ways than that of Banvard and advertised as a “Gigantic American Panorama” that required “four miles of canvass” and depicted—not three thousand miles—but “nearly four thousand miles of American scenery, being the largest and most perfect moving painting in the world.” It took over two hours to view, seated in chairs in a theatre-like hall with fancy chandeliers.44
Many London newspapers acknowledged the charms of both productions, but some delighted in comparing the fidelity and skill of the respective painters, or in supporting either the Banvard or Risley-Smith versions, or in simply reporting on the dueling that occurred in the overheated advertising campaigns waged by the two camps. Banvard accused the pair of having plagiarized his idea and copied his painting. Risley, for his part, wrote the famous painter of American Indians, George Catlin, to have him vouch for the originality and wonderfulness of his production, and published the response. In broadsides, he filled nearly all available space with laudatory quotes from the many London papers who sided with him. Banvard, not to be outdone, collected the signatures of prominent Americans living in England who vouched for the superiority of his work, and published them in the newspapers. He also had glowing reviews from the popular novelist Charles Dickens. On November 14, one could find testimonials running by both Banvard and Smith on the same page of the Manchester Guardian, each proclaiming the superiority and originality of their works. Smith asserted that Banvard had stolen his idea way back in 1839, from an identical panorama that had subsequently been lost in a fire.45
Risley and Smith may have had more energy than Banvard, because Smith created a copy of his giant painting and thus made it possible for Risley to tour it even more widely, gaining ever more exposure. He appears to have subcontracted the panorama business to Henry S. Risley, but either way the panoramas were shown with the Risley name in other European countries, even as far away as Norway. In Oslo (then Kristiana) as late as 1852, it “touched the imagination of the Norwegian poet Vinje, who came away from the exhibition convinced that America was destined to conquer the world.”46 And, of course, it helped to spread Risley’s fame.
The Sky Is the Limit
In 1849, Risley also had other business ventures going on in England. In London’s Vauxhall Gardens he ran a bowling alley, or what was called a “bowling saloon,” where he served an assortment of American drinks. Vauxhall Gardens was at the time one of the more popular London outdoor entertainment spots, where performances and spectacles were often staged, and it gave Risley a chance for even more publicity. Ballooning, still very much in its infancy, was then something of a public spectacle, and some of the most famous balloon ascents at the time took place at Vauxhall Gardens, performed by the legendary aeronaut of the day, Charles Green.
On August 1, 1849, at Vauxhall Gardens, Risley ascended with Green and a party of several other men and women, watched by a cheering crowd of thousands, with music playing and guns firing. As one of the few humans then ever privileged to fly, he later wrote about the experience in an article that resembled his account of the Guadeloupe earthquake of 1843, except that his language was even more colorful. Titled, “Professor Risley’s Ascent in a Nassau Balloon,” it was given wide circulation in newspapers throughout Europe and the United States (including Scientific American).
Because the article was in Risley’s own “voice,” some publications introduced it as an example of “slang literature,” but it reveals much about Risley. He mentions several of the exotic locations he has visited, and he hints that he may have at one point had some formal, higher education. He mentions being accompanied by “Young Hernandez,” whom he refers to as his “protégé,” but who was actually a celebrity in his own right—an Irish-American boy who was a former member of Welch’s Circus and a star equestrian, with whom Risley would have a long association.47 Most of all, however, the article again reveals Risley’s charismatic personality, for it was written with humor and mixed mid-nineteenth-century vernacular with flowery and classical allusions. Stylistically, it might be mistaken for something by Mark Twain.
The article starts out with Risley noting that he has been on mountain tops before, but never aloft, and that practical Americans usually have no interest in building castles in the sky.
The milky way yields no butter, the moon don’t furnish us with cheese; the dog-star don’t follow game. . . . Venus is not half so bright as the dazzling eyes of Kentucky; the shooting stars never bring down anything worth having; the “golden rays of Sol ain’t worth a clod of California earth; . . . the ‘blanket of the night’ is not a marketable commodity—don’t keep one warm; while sheets of lightning are too hot for any climate.”48
The British satirical magazine Punch imagines Shakespeare’s Hamlet, redone by Risley. punch, vol. 11, 1846.
When the balloon actually begins to ascend, Risley describes being nearly rendered speechless by the thrill, until he has a sip from a flask of sherry provided by the pilot. “Talk of sensations! I felt as though my soul had slipped slick from its clay, and was going a holiday making with my heart in its hand.” But amid the light-heartedness, he also sounds like a philosophical twentieth-century astronaut, viewing earth from space for the first time. He realizes that from his exhilarating and precarious new perspective, the normal worries and differences and squabbles of mankind soon pale in significance.
Our lives hung on the chance of a moment, and the best thing we could do, while in the enjoyment of vitality and health, was to gild the pill of existence as brightly as possible. Had I read the Bible from Genesis to Revelations, I could not have learnt a better lesson; national animosities and human prejudices subsided before it.49
With such a flair for publicity, it should not be surprising that, during the 1840s and 1850s, Risley’s name became a household word. His ability to juggle his sons with his feet became known as the “Risley Act,” or the “Risley Business,” but his name also became a metaphor for great agility and thus