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The Mesdag Panorama: Sheltering the all‐embracing view
Author(s) -
Halkes Petra
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
art history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.1
H-Index - 19
eISSN - 1467-8365
pISSN - 0141-6790
DOI - 10.1111/1467-8365.00140
Subject(s) - panorama , harmony (color) , icon , modernity , painting , aesthetics , photography , art , everyday life , art history , visual arts , history , philosophy , epistemology , computer science , programming language
The idyllic harmony of nature and culture, represented in the Mesdag Panorama (The Hague, 1881), is seen as a manifestation of a widespread late nineteenth‐century desire to screen out the fragmentary forces of modernity. Hendrik Willem Mesdag used photography as an aid to paint an icon of an idealized world in which the disembodied eye partakes of a unified Whole. Disjunctive elements are found in the painting, however, that betray a repressed awareness that this harmonious world is a fiction, contrasting the temporal, historical perception of everyday life at the Dutch seaside of 1881.