ropg@ooc.uva.nl (Rop Gonggrijp) (05/14/91)
When you're in The Hague, visit the permanent VR exhibit called 'The Mesdag
Panorama'. It's located at Zeestraat 65 B in the centre of town.....
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Rop Gonggrijp (ropg@ooc.uva.nl) is also editor of Hack-Tic (hack/phreak mag.)
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Any opinions in this posting are wasted on you | tel: +31 20 6001480jorice@maths.tcd.ie (Jonathan Rice) (05/20/91)
In <1991May15.050936.29121@milton.u.washington.edu> ropg@ooc.uva.nl (Rop Gonggri jp) writes: >When you're in The Hague, visit the permanent VR exhibit called 'The Mesdag >Panorama'. It's located at Zeestraat 65 B in the centre of town..... Yeah, I've seen it - it's pretty interesting. For some background here, it's a panorama painting, painted I think in the 1880s. Basically what it is is a cylindrical canvas - fairly big, maybe 40 feet diameter and 20 feet high (I don't know - I'm terrible at guessing things like this). You come up through stairs at the center at emerge in this wooden sort of beach hut on the top of a dune. All around you is the seaside area of Scheveningen, close to the Hague, as it was in the 1880s. Simulated dune (with real sand and old boots and rope and stuff) stretches down from your hut where it merges with the painting. Really it's amazingly good. Yes, you can obviously see the seams in things and you can easily see it's just a painting, but every so often, you find yourself in a real hut on a real beach. After a second, you snap out of it, but it's a bit disorienting. Panorama paintings were very popular around that time and were usually undertaken as commercial enterprises - kind of like the "new ride" at a fun park. Panorama Mesdag was built to cash in on the tourists who visited the Hague and Scheveningen at that time - a big trade, apparently. The painting itself was primarily done by H. W. Mesdag, one of the foremost Dutch seascape painters of the day. He was generally criticized for "selling out" to commercial interests when he agreed to do the painting, but apparently when people saw how good the end painting was, they were overwhelmed and pronounced it a masterpiece. At least that's what the museum itself says, but they would, wouldn't they? The sketches for the painting were done by Mesdag standing in a specially- constructed stand on a dune at Scheveningen. The stand had a cylinder of glass running around the top of it, through which Mesdag looked and directly sketched on. The sketches were then transferred onto paper by putting sheets up around the inside of the glass. The paper sketches were then greatly enlarged and transferred onto the panorama canvases. I think the glass stand idea was Mesdag's and greatly improved the speed and accuracy of the work. So yes, all you VR people, go see what it was like 100 years ago! At the Panorama, there's also an exhibition on panoramas in general of the time. It's fascinating, especially if you know some Dutch, but I got along with just English ok. Also in the Hague is an Omnimax theatre, called the Omniversum, if you haven't seen this, with a pocket-sized flight simulator outside. Both fun. In Rotterdam, there's an IMAX theatre, but I didn't get to see this. o----------------------o----------------------------o--------------------------o | Jonathan Rice | Email: jorice@cs.tcd.ie | He was a common fly | |----------------------| Tel: 353.1.772941 x2156 (w)| With a taste for fashion | |Computer Science Dept.| 353.1.6245415 (h)| They were thrown together| | Trinity College | Fax: 353.1.772204 | In a heat of passion | | Dublin 2, | woof /\___/ | - "Human Fly", | | Ireland. | /| |\ | The Horseflies | o----------------------o----------------------------o--------------------------o