Panorama

26 September 2015 – 10 January 2016

Over the centuries, artists have used lofty, sometimes imagined viewpoints to create panoramas: dramatic, sweeping overviews of the world. Such panoramas can express a range of ideas, from civic pride and political power to Romantic notions of the sublime and the awe-inspiring power of nature.

This display, which ran concurrently with the exhibition Soaring Flight: Peter Lanyon’s Gliding Paintings, explored the tradition of panoramic landscape before the age of powered flight. Ranging from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries and including works by John ‘Warwick’ Smith, J. M. W. Turner, Canaletto and Adam Frans van der Meulen, it considered some of the many facets of artists’ enduring fascination with the infinite.