l' a r t i s t e
Roger Hallett was born in 1929 in Bristol. He attended Bristol Cathedral School, and then got a job with the Bristol architects, WS Skinner, making tracings and working drawings. In 1952 he was called up to do his Ntional Service in the army, and served in the Intelligence Corps in Trieste. (...) After completing studies at the Slade School of Art in London he emigrated to Australia under the ₤ 10 scheme, working for television as a scenic designer in Sydney and then as a set designer in Melbourne. He returned to England in 1960.
Back in the West Country he taught at the Cathedral School in Wells, and at the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol. In Bath he organised painting holidays, Tking groups of amateur artists abroad, especially to Holland. It was on one of these painting holidays that he discovered Mesdag’s Panorama of Scheveningen in The Hague.
Hallett was bowled over by it. He resolved to record Bath in the same way. For Bath the obvious view-point would be Alexandra Park or Beechen Cliff. Photographs were called for, so Hallett borrowed a hot air balloon from Bath University’s Balloon Club, resorting to a crane when the balloon refused to stay still. There were problems finding a studio, but he discovered a disused factory where Laport Industries had made fullers earth. There, single-handed, he painted his panorama, 7 metres high and 70 metres in circumference. (...)
It was in 1993 that Roger Hallett moved to Salies de Béarn and promptly set to work painting a panorama for his new hometown. (...) Today (...), Hallett devotes his time to painting panorama models that can, if required, be digitally enlarged. ‘…with modern technology, painters attracted by this particular form of art never need again have whole works rolled up in storage as my Bath Panorama now is,’ the artist says. He has painted Lourdes, which is not very far from Salies. He has also completed a panorama of Gibraltar – it would be impossible to find a better panorama subject, he tells me, ‘because it is so full of exciting perspectives on a relatively small piece of land in a vast area’ – and Bordeaux (...).
In March 2003 Roger Hallett deposited the journals he kept when painting his panorama of Bath with the Bath & North-East Somerset Record Office. They will prove invaluable for panorama historians in the future.

Biography (excerpts) by Ralph Hyde
in: THE WORLD OF PANORAMAS - Ten Years of International Panorama Conferences