Frames are one of the most powerful elements of any work of art because they help in so many different ways to guide the eye towards important elements of the work, as well as shape so many elements surrounding it.
This is why the choice of bespoke frame surrounding an artwork is of such paramount importance; making the right choice not only accentuates the work in the space it is in but can add to the meaning of the art itself if the choice is appropriate and fitting.
The subject of framing leads to a rather unusual question; if you aim to create the world’s largest painting, what is the most suitable frame to hold it in?
If your name is Thomas Horner, a 19th-century surveyor and panoramic painter, the answer is to build a replica of an Ancient Roman building complete with a gigantic dome and prototype lift, name it after a completely different Roman landmark, and flee the country due to the sheer expense of the exercise.
The world’s largest painting naturally needs to be held in the world’s largest frame, and this is the forgotten history of both.
The Tragedy Of Thomas Hornor And The London Colosseum
Born in Hull in 1785, Thomas Hornor was an engineer and surveyor of some renown, combining his technical, historical and artistic knowledge to an impressive degree.
He became a very wealthy man by selling portfolios of areas in South Wales, exploring them in impressive detail for the time, selling them as vivid tours of the region that wealthy families could enjoy at home.
One of them bears the price of 500 guineas, which assuming the modern definition of £1.05 means it was worth the equivalent today of over £35,000.
The binding concept was itself a rather interesting example of framing, but Mr Hornor was a driven man, and the money and status that his successful portfolio volumes provided him allowed him to return to London for his most ambitious project to date.
He went to the upper lantern of St Paul’s Cathedral whilst the orb and cross were being replaced and sketched a detailed panorama of London’s skyline circa 1820 before the day started and the smog became too overwhelming to provide a clear view.
Once he had his sketches, he started to look around for a potential way to sell them or display them, but the conventional route quickly closed off to him.
However, he had his connections, and one of them was the Right Honourable Gentlemen for Leominster, Rowland Stephenson MP.
A son of a banker and great nephew of the MP for Carlisle of the same name, the younger Rowland Stephenson worked for the family banking firm, Stephenson, Remington and Company, worked as the treasurer of St Bartholomew’s Hospital and stayed in an apartment at the hospital.
His victory as an MP came after several attempts in Carlisle, West Looe in Cornwall and Newport in Wales, and largely made it in due to exploiting technicalities in election law of the time.
Mr Stephenson agreed to help back the project, but both wildly underestimated the costs of the Decimus Burton-designed building, which featured a sixteen-sided polygonal dome, with each wall having a different part of the panorama as painted by E. T. Parris over the course of four arduous, dangerous years.
Mr Parris was meant to be the lead of a team of painters, all working to Mr Hornor’s impressive sketches, but after it turned out that the painters did not know how to work together to keep a consistent result due to the lack of familiarity with the needs of panorama painting, Mr Parris took on all the work himself.
Reaching the top and bottom of the 40,000 square feet of canvas was nearly impossible, and Mr Parris used an elaborate series of platforms, bridges and scaffoldings, even holding himself up via cords in the roof at some points.
He fell twice and was lucky not to seriously hurt himself, and the results of his labour were widely hailed in the surviving accounts of the London Colosseum as a beautiful and unique perspective of London.
Mr Horner even designed an “ascending platform” that would, for a price, raise onlookers up to get a perfect view of the panorama. This was the first lift ever made in the United Kingdom, completed two decades before Elisha Otis’ landmark demonstration of the safety elevator in 1852.
The building was innovative, striking, beautiful and the art within was praised by the people who saw it. So what went wrong?
Pantheon Of Cards
As one might expect, building a replica of the Roman Pantheon in London was not cheap in the slightest, and the building racked up over £60,000 in debt (£5.47m adjusted for inflation), more than 100 times the cost of one of Mr Hornor’s portfolios.
This was more than either he or Mr Stephenson had, even though the latter had a bank with his name on it.
A huge scandal was triggered when reports emerged that he had taken thousands of pounds worth of cash and shares from the bank, cashed the securities in, bought some guns and fled the country.
Knowing that this left him as the one debtor that bailiffs could claim from, Mr Hornor fled the country as well, going from a rich artist who built a replica Roman landmark to hold a gigantic panorama to a destitute man in New York who died in penury in 1844.
This did Mr Parris a disservice, as his talents and skills were overshadowed by the controversy surrounding the building where he did his finest work.
It ultimately ended up passing to a group of trustees, who kept the building running until 1843, when it fell into decline and was sold for around £24,000 (£2.58m adjusted for inflation)
The new owner tried to keep it going as a Glypoteca (Museum of Sculpture), commissioned mr Parris to repaint the panorama with more detail and added a nighttime panorama that would appear in the evenings and depict the same view.
However, this ultimately did not help, and the building was sold for a tenth of its value in 1855, it was left to rot until 1875 when it was finally demolished to make way for the Cambridge Gate.
Had such an audacious project been completed today, it would likely have been preserved, if only for the hubris of its achievement. Instead, it lingers as a forgotten memory of a record that has not been broken since, and the importance of a good frame.