The Colosseum, Hornorʼs London Panorama, and the London Diorama in Regentʼs Park

The Colosseum in London was a vast structure built 1824–26 to house an ambitious circular, painted panorama of London, along with other entertainments. The panorama was based on drawings by Thomas Hornor (1785–1844), a multi‐talented surveyor, cartographer, and landscape designer. Hornor made his drawings circa 1820–23, while daringly housed atop scaffolding erected at the summit of St. Paulʼs Cathedral. The drawings were transferred to canvas by the painter, E. T. Parris, who worked section by section on an enormous canvas stretched inside the Colosseum dome. The sections were then painted by Parris along with other artists between 1825 and 1829. The completed work was believed to be “in effect the largest oil painting the world had ever seen”, exhibited inside “the largest [dome] in the land”, which was “even larger than that on St. Paulʼs, as . . . proprietors never tired of telling their public”. Inside the dome, visitors were able to view the panorama by ascending to a lower sight level and to an upper sight level, reached either by stairs or by an “ascending room”—the cityʼs first passenger elevator. In order to raise funds, the panorama exhibition opened prematurely in 1829, before the painting and other exhibits were quite finished, and the project would not be fully realized in its first instantiation until 1832. Soon after the opening in 1829, Hornor went bankrupt and fled to America, where his financial backer, a prominent banker, had already absconded, leaving behind huge debts (Baigent,“Hornor, Thomas [1785–1844]”; Hyde, The Regentʼs Park Colosseum, 21, 22–23, 35, 42).

A related amusement, which opened in 1823, six years prior to the Colosseum and near its site in Regentʼs Park, was the London Diorama. Based on the diorama in Paris invented by Louis‐Jacques‐Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851) and an architectural painter, Charles Bouton, the London Diorama theater was designed by the artist and architectural illustrator, Auguste Charles Pugin (1768/9–1832, father of the architect and designer, A. W. N. Pugin), and an engineer, James Morgan. Its effects were achieved by manipulating light reflected off an opaque painting and refracted through a transparency. The auditorium, in which observers were seated, was rotated from one diorama scene to the next (Saunders, Regentʼs Park, 130).

Ruskin mentions the Colosseum in connection with one of its side exhibits, the “Swiss Cottage”, in the course of writing about Switzerland for his Account of a Tour on the Continent (see the contextual glosses for “It was a wide and stretchy sweep” [prose]). He also attempted a panoramic drawing of his own, “Part of the Town of Coblentz from the Northern Bank of the Moselle”, made during the Tour of 1833, in the summer preceding his composition of the “Account”. The long, horizontal drawing outlines the facades of Koblenzʼs major Romanesque and Gothic buildings facing the river (see Drawings from the Tour of 1833).

In responding to these spectacles, Ruskin touched tangentially on one of the great metropolitan building projects of his parentsʼ generation, John Nashʼs (1752–1835) Regentʼs Park, Regent Street, and their associated buildings. The Colosseum was built in the southwest corner of Regentʼs Park, between two of Nashʼs terraces lining the outer drive of the park. In keeping with the neoclassical terraces, the Colosseum was designed by Decimus Burton (1800–1881) in Greek Revival style—specifically, modeled on the Pantheon in Rome (Arnold, “Burton, Decimus [1800–1881]”).

As architect to the Prince Regent, Nash conceived a vision for transforming Marylebone, a country park on the northern edge of London, into a new urban residential park for the city. Nashʼs plans were informed by the taste for the picturesque, which his former partner, the landscape designer Humphry Repton (1752–1818), had promoted in giving shape to numerous estates (albeit while embroiled in controversy with theorists of the picturesque, Uvedale Price [1747–1829] and Richard Payne Knight [1751–1824]). Nash complemented these park settings with picturesque cottages and villas in a wide range of styles, from structures that he modeled on a “picture” in the strict sense of drawing inspiration from structures depicted in the Italian campagna scenes by Claude Lorrain; to irregular, castellated dwellings; to thatch cottages; and most exotically, to the “Indian” forms of Brighton Pavilion, which he conceived for the Prince Regent (Summerson, Architecture of Britain, 288–94).

Nash brought the picturesque to bear on city planning with the Regentʼs Park project, begun in wartime, in 1811–12, prior to Waterloo and the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Rather than simply extending the city to cover the space formerly belonging to Marylebone, Nash landscaped the park as a picturesque setting to showcase (yet another) palace for the Prince Regent, as well as a grand church to serve as a “Valhalla” for the nationʼs heroes. These structures were never realized, but more significantly the plan sponsored the design and construction of numerous urban villas—a new kind of urban residence set in Reptonian picturesque landscaping, each villa invisible to its neighbor. Some of the first of these villas were designed by Decimus Burton, the architect of the Colosseum, whose work spanned a wide range of what could be considered a villa—so wide that Dana Arnold characterizes Burtonʼs ideas as “a state of mind as . . . [the houses] offered their occupants a retreat from the rigours of life in the metropolis” (Arnold, “A Family Affair”, 117).

To connect these residences with Westminster and the more established haunts of the ruling class—Pall Mall, St. Jamesʼs Park, and Green Park (where Ruskin was introduced to Samuel Rogers, avatar of taste, at his St. James Place townhouse)—Nash cut a bold new north‐south thoroughfare, Regent Street. The collonaded avenue stretched north from Carlton House, the Prince Regentʼs residence remodeled by Nash, through Portland Place, lined with buildings designed by the fashionable architects of the preceding generation, the Scotsmen Robert (1728–92) and James Adam (1732–94), to the outsize neoclassicism of Nashʼs terraces and Burtonʼs Colosseum (Margetson, Regency London, 45–55). Richard Altick speculates that the Colosseum, erected in the southwest corner of Regentʼs Park and connected to Pall Mall by Regent Street, was conceived by its backers as “a kind of public counterpart of Carlton House, the sumptuous mansion . . . on which the Prince Regent, now George IV, had squandered a fortune” (Altick, The Shows of London, 142).

For other contexts in which the young Ruskin encountered transformative Greek Revival “improvements” that altered the style and experience of urban settings, see City of London; Neoclassical and Napoleonic‐Era Architecture in Milan and Northern Italy; Early Victorian Cemetery Architecture.

Hornorʼs panorama and Puginʼs diorama were located in Regentʼs Park because their creators and backers believed that their spectacles would command a sophisticated audience. Among their predecessors, Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg exhibited his ediophusikon exclusively to a genteel public, and Robert Barker and his son and associates maintained the Leicester Square Panorama as a respectable entertainment from 1793 to 1863. Although Altick traces a decline in the kind and quality of entertainment that successive proprietors of the Colosseum offered over the years, these institutions were founded with pretensions of advancing their respective arts of scenic representation, and they claimed a place in the heritage of the fine arts in Britain.

However Ruskin may have responded to such claims, his youthful encounters with the Old Masters—if only with their names and copies of their works—occurred at these exhibitions as well as in art galleries at home and abroad. Like other visitors to the Colosseum, he entered its imposing Doric portico and passed through “a spacious rotunda called ‘the Saloon of the Arts’ or ‘the Hall of Sculpture’. Here, by invitation of the ‘committee of management’ (Hornorʼs creditors), ‘professors of the ingenious and fine arts’ exhibited their works. Alongside recent productions there stood casts of Phidiasʼs Diana, the Venus de Medici, the Apollo Belvedere, Canovaʼs Three Graces, and replicas of Michelangeloʼs Moses and Lorenzo of the Medicis”. Similarly, audiences in the darkened auditorium of the Diorama, while awaiting the illumination, could gaze up at the “ceiling of transparent fabric painted in colors, with portraits of Reynolds, West, Poussin, Ruisdael, Rembrandt, Vernet, Claude Lorrain, Berghem, Teniers, Rubens, Raphael, and Gainsborough: a combined pantheon of Old Masters and modern British ones was invoked to consecrate this latest attempt to expand the boundaries of fine art” (Altick, The Shows of London, 147, 164–65, and see 152–53, 161–62).