The Atlanta Cyclorama: A Painting the Size of a Building
Georgia
In Atlanta's Grant Park there is a painting that is roughly fifty feet tall and three hundred sixty feet in circumference. It wraps entirely around the inside of a circular room, so that when you stand in the center and look outward in any direction, you see the Battle of Atlanta on July twenty-second, eighteen sixty-four, rendered in a scale that has no equivalent in American art.
The Atlanta Cyclorama was completed in eighteen eighty-six by a team of German and American painters working in Milwaukee. Cycloramas were a popular entertainment form in the late nineteenth century, immersive panoramic paintings that let audiences feel they were standing inside a historical event. At least a dozen Civil War cycloramas were painted in the decade after the war. The Atlanta one is the only one that survives intact and is still displayed in its original context.
The painting depicts the moment in the afternoon of July twenty-second when Confederate General John Bell Hood's army attacked the Union Army of the Tennessee, commanded by General James McPherson. McPherson was killed in that engagement, making him the highest-ranking Union officer killed in combat during the entire war. The Cyclorama captures the chaos of that afternoon: artillery firing, soldiers falling, the railroads and warehouses of Atlanta visible in the background.
The painting was acquired by the City of Atlanta in eighteen ninety-eight and displayed in Grant Park for more than a century. In twenty fifteen it was moved to the newly reconstructed museum at the Atlanta History Center in Buckhead, where conservators spent years cleaning and stabilizing the canvas. The diorama in front of the painting, which includes three-dimensional figures and terrain blending into the flat canvas, was added in the nineteen thirties under a Works Progress Administration project.
Standing in the center of that room, with the battle curving around you on every side, gives you a physical sense of scale that no photograph or screen can replicate. It is the largest oil painting in the United States.
