Roger Parker (Schaffner Visiting Professor Lecture) “Painting (And Sounding) The Nineteenth-Century Metropolis”

The Nicholson Center for British Studies
Schaffner Visiting Professor Lecture (2022-23)

Roger Parker
Emeritus Professor of Music
Kings College London

Introduction by Jim Chandler

In 1849, the painter Charles Robert Leslie gave a lecture at the Royal Academy during which he discussed a recurrent problem with one of the most popular public spectacles in early nineteenth-century London. “I would ask whether others have not felt what has always occurred to me in looking at a Panorama,—that exactly in the degree in which the eye is deceived the stillness of the figures and the silence of the place produces a strange and somewhat unpleasant effect, and the more so if the subject places us in the city. We want the hum of population, and the din of carriages”. His complaint was common: as the modern metropolis increasingly became the subject of pictorial representation, and as these representations became ever larger and ever more concerned with realism, the more often were heard complaints about the inevitable silence that surrounded them. Impresarios were, as ever, quick to respond. It was relatively easy to provide sound effects for scenes of natural splendour (wind and thunder could be supplied on demand), and grand religious scenes had their own repertoire: in 1835 a depiction of the interior of Florence’s Santa Croce was accompanied by a organ rendering (perhaps mechanical) of a Haydn Mass. But what of the ultimate self representation, what of London-based panoramas of the great city itself? In some cases, at least, it seems as though a curious reversal took place: vast pictorial representations of the city remained immersed in comparative silence; and because of this, and in spite of lamentation, they offered an alternative existence, one in which the gazing public could dream an urban dream increasingly denied them in the noisy streets.

This lecture is free and open to the public. 

This lecture is being organized by the Nicholson Center for British Studies, with support from the Sara H. Schaffner Visiting Professorship fund (Provost's Office). 

Image: Detail from Bird’s Eye View from the Staircase & the Upper Part of the Pavilion in the Colosseum, Regent’s Park (1829), a coloured aquatint by Rudolph Ackermann