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Editor’s Note: This is the sixth post in Part V of the Visual Cultures of the Circumpolar North series edited by Isabelle Gapp and guest edited by Sarah Pickman.
In April 1819, under the auspices of Henry Aston Barker (1774-1856), the first Arctic panorama opened in London. Barker was the son of Robert Barker, often cited as the inventor of the panorama form itself, and the younger Barker carried on his father’s legacy with this Arctic representation. While perhaps not quite yet the spectacular Arctic of paintings of the later nineteenth century, or what Chauncey Loomis would go on to call the “Arctic sublime,” the 1819 panorama slowly began educating the British public on what the Arctic “is.”1
No copies of the 1819 panorama are known to survive, as the vast canvases, often spanning over 10,000 square feet, were poorly stored, often in damp warehouses, after exhibitions and gradually decayed. However, its content can be recovered through a small pictorial key that does survive, and textual descriptions made at the time it was unveiled. The panorama depicted HMS Dorothea and Trent as they—led by the Scottish Captain David Buchanan (1780–1838) and supported by the then-novice Lieutenant John Franklin (1786–1847)—set out from Spitzbergen, Norway, in 1818 to search for the Northwest Passage. Popular interest in the Arctic in Britain stretched much further back, with Martin Frobisher’s voyages in the sixteenth century standing as early examples. The memory of Inuit individuals that Frobisher brought to England still lingered in public consciousness in the early nineteenth century.2 However, what the 1819 Arctic panorama achieved—for the first time—was to present the Arctic to its audiences as an immersive visual experience, much like an early form of IMAX or 3D cinema. It was no longer a textual construct to be deciphered through explorers’ writings, which often likened the Arctic to a desert and drew upon architectural imagery, almost prompting readers to wonder whether pyramids might rise in the Arctic. Nor was it any longer a blank space on the cartographic plane.
The panorama has traditionally been understood as an imperial visual form that celebrated British colonial pursuits and became renowned for staging large-scale, immersive spectacles with connotations of imperial expansion.3 Only a few years before the Arctic panorama, Henry Aston Barker’s depiction of the Battle of Waterloo had earned him a net profit of £10,000 in a matter of weeks from visitor fees, bringing British military might vividly before audiences at home. Other scholars have interpreted the panorama as a means of disciplining capitalist subjectivity and spectatorship, a view supported by the fact that panoramas were accompanied by extensive keys—annotated with numbers and commentary—designed to instruct viewers how and where to look, ensuring that no detail went unobserved.4 Yet, the Arctic panorama, in its pedagogical and didactic imperative, draws attention to an important but often overlooked parallel activity: translation. Reconstructing the 1819 panorama experience becomes itself a form of translation—an effort to recreate the perspective of viewers encountering the Arctic for the first time and to trace how the image of the Arctic, as we now recognize it, gradually came into being.
The 1819 Arctic panorama was a composite image: its creation drew on interviews, materials supplied by the Admiralty—which persuaded Henry Barker to stage the show in order to incite support for renewed British Arctic exploration after the Napoleonic Wars—watercolors by Lieutenant Frederic William Beechey (1796-1856) of the 1818 expedition, and various other ephemera. In assembling the panorama, Barker faced an Aristotelian challenge: to make every element cohere seamlessly so that no part appeared out of place. He had to accommodate both the Admiralty’s objectives and the desires of his audiences, who expected an overwhelming visual spectacle. The latter proved more difficult than anticipated, for the Arctic remained visually alien, and glaciers, as Kate Flint has observed, were perceived as neither wholly dead nor entirely alive—their place and status within the natural order perpetually unsettled.5 Indeed, early explorers often questioned not what they had seen, but whether they had seen anything at all; the Arctic landscape was so unfamiliar to them that it exposed the epistemological limits of perception itself.6 Thus, translating the Arctic extended beyond language, encompassing not merely a shift between semantic codes but a movement across media and knowledge systems—a process that entailed both change and continuity, as the etymology of “translation,” to carry across, suggests.
At the same time, the 1819 panorama is a decidedly subdued affair. After enduring bad weather, the ship required repairs, forcing the crew to remain on the Norwegian coast. Lacking the supernatural elements of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, published just a year earlier, or the theatrical drama characteristic of many of Barker’s other panoramas, the first Arctic panorama revealed all the strains of a first attempt at translation. The icebergs were described by contemporary observers as rough and uneven, resembling mountains more than ice. The accompanying keys depict the Arctic landscape as one of “dreariness” and “desolation,” filled with “craggy mountains” and none of it is particularly exciting. Most wildlife, especially birds, are described as “beautiful” and “elegant,” though the little auk (Alca alle) is deemed “so stupid, and easily frightened,” and the walruses “hideous.”7 In assembling the Arctic panorama, Barker positioned his translation between two registers—the familiar and the unfamiliar. To render the entire environment as an imaginative abyss would no doubt have been too alienating for viewers. How, after all, could one stand on the panorama’s rotunda viewing platform and imagine oneself “owning” the landscape—a gesture essential to sustaining public support for the voyages—if they could scarcely discern what it was they were seeing?
Two hundred years later, we may approach the 1819 panorama through the lenses of ambiguity—since the language proper for describing glaciers had yet to be fully established—and multimodal translation, insofar as cryogenic forms were caught between multiple, often competing narratives, from myth to geology. To evaluate translation, following Walter Benjamin, is to judge if fragments were brought into some form of harmony; whether Barker achieved this feat remains anyone’s guess. Yet arguably his “translation” was able to honor the profound ambiguity of ice as a liminal, formless, elemental form and convey to panorama visitors the same curiosity that cryogenic structures had sparked in the minds of explorers. As Arctic images proliferate today, we might ask whose perspectives these translations reflect and whose interests they serve, even when all we see is an ostensibly neutral documentary image mimicking reality.
Notes
[1] Chauncey Loomis, “Arctic Sublime,” in Nature and the Victorian Imagination, ed. U. C. Knoepflmacher and George B. Tennyson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 95–112.
[2] Robert McGhee, Arctic Voyages of Martin Frobisher: An Elizabethan Adventure, vol. 28 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001).
[3] Bernard Comment, The Panorama (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), 19.
[4] Jonathan Crary, “Géricault, the Panorama, and Sites of Reality in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Grey Room (2002): 7–25.
[5] Kate Flint, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 119.
[6] Christopher P. Heuer, “Arctic Matters in Early America,” in Scale, ed. Jennifer L. Roberts (Chicago: Terra Foundation for American Art, 2016), accessed October 26, 2025, https://aaeportal.com/?id=-19951.
[7] Henry Ashton Barker, Description of a View of the North Coast of Spitzbergen (London: J. and C. Adlard, 1820), 3-4.
For more on the Arctic panorama see: Russell Potter, Arctic Spectacles: The Frozen North in Visual Culture, 1818–1875 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997); Laurie Garrison, “Imperial Vision in the Arctic: Fleeting Looks and Pleasurable Distractions in Barker’s Panorama and Shelley’s Frankenstein,” Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 52 (2008): n.p. Doi:10.7202/019804ar; Eavan O’Dochartaigh, Visual Culture and Arctic Voyages: Personal and Public Art and Literature of the Franklin Search Expedition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022). Doi: 10.1017/9781108992794; and Isabelle Gapp “Ice in Motion: Panoramic Perspectives and Moving Pictures,”ARCTIC 76, no. 2 (2023): 160-178. Doi: 10.14430/arctic77740
Feature image: Frederick William Beechey. North Coast of Spitzbergen, Red-Cliff Sound, 1818–1820. University of Calgary Archives and Special Collections. Public domain.
Oliver Aas
Latest posts by Oliver Aas (see all)
- Translating the Arctic, ca. 1819 - November 10, 2025