This continuous circular view covers almost two thousand square feet of canvas. The Panorama of the Palace and Gardens of Versailles was John Vanderlyn’s most ambitious project. He plotted the perspective so that when you stand on the center platform, you see vistas leading convincingly in all directions, creating a deceptively real impression of the actual site.

On one side, you see the vast forested gardens with the Grand Canal. When you turn, you view the western façade of the palace and the so-called water garden. If you look closely, you can spot Louis XVIII, representing the restored French monarchy, on the palace balcony. Tourists, dressed for holiday, stroll all around the grounds.

The Palace and Gardens of Versailles are located about eleven miles southwest of Paris. From 1682 until 1790, Versailles was the official residence of the kings of France. In its heyday, it was the most sumptuous palace in Europe, envied and imitated by many foreign rulers.

At a time when recreational travel was becoming popular, panoramas that portrayed distant places like Versailles attracted many viewers. Painted on large strips of canvas, they could be dismantled to carry around for the entertainment of people who lived in the countryside.

Vanderlyn wanted to use his panorama to impress and educate his American audiences, to make them appreciate art—particularly his own portrait and history paintings, which he hung in galleries adjacent to this monumental painting. But in 1824, he wrote: “On the whole, the exhibition of this picture failed altogether in the success I anticipated.” In the end, Vanderlyn died alone and poverty-stricken in a rented tavern room. Despite his ultimate failure, the panorama was the principal attraction of New York’s first art museum, the Rotunda, built by Vanderlyn in City Hall Park to house his panoramas and paintings.