Recently two friends were over from the UK – a Seville reunion. They stayed at Scheveningen, minutes from the beach and boulevard. It was mostly sunny. I pointed out some sights: the red lighthouse, the building with the green shutters, and Seinpostduin – the high dune on which the painter Hendrik Mesdag sat in 1880 to make the preliminary sketches for the commission he’d received for a 360-degree painting.
At one time there were many panoramas. They were expensive to maintain and once photography and film were available, people’s interest declined and most were demolished.
Panorama Mesdag, The Hague (1881) is the world’s oldest surviving panorama in its original location. The painting is over 14m high, has a diameter of 40m and the circumference is 120m2. That makes it the largest painting in the Netherlands.
Scheveningen was then an independent fishing village with its own clothing and dialect. There were about 500 houses and people lived from herring fishing.
When he got the commission, Mesdag was already well-known for his seascapes. Several of these are shown at the Panorama. He wanted the sky to look as though it was the weather on one single day. He made many sketches, also of the houses which were transferred to canvas using a grid. The original glass cylinder in which he sat is shown at Panorama Mesdag.
The Panorama commission was a massive job and Mesdag was fortunate to be able to put a team together: his wife Sientje Mesdag-van Houten who was an established painter in her own right, Théophile de Bock who painted the sky and dunes with broad brush strokes, Bernard Blommers, and George Hendrik Breitner who specialised in painting horses. Mesdag himself focused on the sea and the flat-bottomed boats on the beach.
It took them four months to complete the work. Instead of a signature, Mesdag painted Sientje. She sits on the beach painting under a white parasol. Panorama Mesdag opened on 1 August 1881.
It’s an astonishing experience – come up the wooden staircase and suddenly you stand on the viewing platform: scenery all around you. There is so much rich detail: dozens of boats, horses pulling in the boats, cavalry horses, the sky, the women out with their washing, bathers, the steam train on its way from The Hague, birds.
Because of the glass roof, the weather changes as you are there, and the illusion is complete because the platform is surrounded by real sand with objects on it. You are standing on Seinpostduin, more than 140 years ago.
My thanks to David Cooke, Editor of The High Window, where this poem first appeared.
Panorama Mesdag
Invisible skylights let through the light.
Just as I arrive upstairs, the sun comes out
across the busy beach I know so well.
All those horses. In two neat columns,
the cavalry on exercise, heading south.
Other horses pull the flat-bottomed boats
onto the sand. Fish is being sold straight
from the boats. Women are repairing nets.
Mesdag’s wife has been included.
I know where to look for Sientje, painting
in a folding chair, striped sunshade.
Am I hallucinating the sound of gulls?
I see the seams in the canvas, and I don’t care.
As I go round the wooden platform, here
is the washing laid out on the grass,
a plume of smoke, the empty clog.
Acacia Publications 