Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg's Eidophusikon + Gainsborough's Show Box: Illusion and Special Effects in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg's Eidophusikon

 

Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg painted a panorama - he called it the Eidophusikon - which he exhibited in Panton Square in London. He made it as realistic as possible by using lighting and sound effects. It was very popular. Gainsborough went to see it every evening. De Loutherburg wanted to show a free expanse of landscape and evade the constriction of the frame. Pictures have been painted on concave surfaces with the same Idea.

Walter J. Phillips watercolour artist and printmaker, writer Born on 25 October, 1884 at Barton-on-Humber, Canada. Died in Victoria, in 1963 after a lengthy illness; ashes spread in the Rocky Mountains.

http://www.acmi.net.au/AIC/LOUTHERBOURG_BIO.html

The creator of the Eidophusikon was an artist and scenographer by the name of Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg. His radical theatre employed a unique visual technology which included controlled lighting, clockwork automata, 3-dimensional models, and an accompanying soundscape. The effect was unlike anything the audience had previously encountered, convincing to the point that during the recreation of a torrential storm wrecking a ship at sea, one of the audience, a young artist called William Pyne, feels he is actually there: he later says he had to stop himself from crying out hoarsely in terror.
http://www.edmstudio.com/eidophusikon/index.html

• Loutherbourg (in Philip James de Loutherbourg (artist)) ...to have introduced scrims (gauzes that appear solid or transparent depending on the direction of light) and three-dimensional scenery. He also experimented with coloured media for lighting. His Eidophusikon, a miniature theatre, demonstrated these techniques in a smaller, more controlled environment. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/180962/Eidophusikon
  

Gainsborough's Show Box: Illusion and Special Effects in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Ann Bermingham‌

University of California, Santa Barbara

ABSTRACT

In the introduction to this special issue of the Huntington Library Quarterly, Ann Bermingham uses Thomas Gainsborough's show box to reflect on the major themes of the issue, including imagination, the privatization of the aesthetic, the technologies of illusion, and the uncanny. The show box opens onto the realm of visual magic and imagination, and in doing so anticipates many of the popular visual spectacles that emerge at the end of the eighteenth century. The box embodies the period's fascination with art's power to realize imagination, and imagination's power to destabilize the boundaries between psychic and material realities.

http://caliber.ucpress.net/doi/abs/10.1525/hlq.2007.70.2.203?journalCode=hlq

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