Roger Hallett and Salies de Béarn |
With all other panoramas of the world, of which this is the thirtieth extant, one arrives by a staircase to a first floor position inside the circle of the canvas and remains on a viewing platform. But this panorama is the only one where the building has been adapted and dictates to the picture. Having already its excellent natural top light has made the whole thing possible.
Foregrounds of panoramas are alarmingly large and you can see for example that just two roofs, that of the church of st Vincent and the adjoining hangar of the presbytere yard dominate about a third of the canvas. If you try to make them smaller or leave them out altogether you lose the necessary control and get into awful trouble because you must put something else in their place.
The old maxim ' if you can't beat 'em - join 'em' was the only solution but to make them as interesting as possible just in the paintwork. The very first thing was to put the apex of the largest roof firmly over the entry door to minimise the interest in this area baut at the same time make its texture and brushwork interesting enough to sustain its size.
To paint a picture in the round, the artist is required to work from a central perspective and to keep it always under firm control. The view of Salies de Béarn is so rich in architectural detail, the roofs are individual and unique, and particularly in the old part of the town, they form a mellow pattern against the direction of the sun.
Portraits, whether of people or of landscapes and of course towns too, are only ever seen from one viewpoint and this necessitates the exclusion of some favourite views. However the choice of the 'clocher St Vincent' - the steeple of St Vincent's church - was ultimately the correct as now, since the conversion of the 'clocher' to 'Atelier Portables', it is no longer possible to ever be able to see this same view again.
Painting interest as opposed to the more normal architectural or figurative interest is demonstrated by the elaborately tiled and corrugated roof surfaces, a couple of cats - one even serving as a door handle -, pigeons being fed at the window of the Esgabat Cinema.
The Queen of England also at the cinema having a quiet sob that she is not Queen of Salies de Béarn.
Boys playing basketball to enliven an otherwise empty yard. Long pointed shadows of the trees at the church door have been introduced and even the perrenial puddle of rain which opportunes some interesting reflections.
The second biggest challenge artistically was to keep these large roof lines looking right from wherever one is in the room. Such a tight curve of canvas changing even the 'egg' shape to accomodate a few precious centimetres opportuned by the shape of the counter in the boutique just behind the game of basketball.
Up behind the cinema 'l'Esbagat' we have the 'Residence du Chateau' whose upper floors are even higher than our viewpoint in the St Vincent steeple, and a great change of height had to be created to get down to the lowest point afforded by the reflection under the bridge crossing the Saleys. Normally canalised in the center of the riverbed, it is shown in full flood, again for its interest value.
Strong traditions have grown around the art of the panorama and derive from the earliest days where such pictures were the mass enternainment of the day. The artist's signature for example is replaced by an 'autoportrait', and here he appears with Martine Charbonneau on the balcony of her music studio.
A raging fire would have been shown for its entertainment value and as we have here the burnt out shell of the 'Hotel de France et d'Angleterre' nicely poised on the skyline, there was an excellent oppotunity to have it still burning.
Incidents involving ambulances or the police were in the same spirit and often showed an added interest, si here we have the gendarmerie attending my illegally parked car at the bridge and the parking attendant apprehending a Citroen Mahari disgracefully parked at the cenotaph.
Sculpture was always employed in front of the canvas to reinforce the artistic illusion of being there, and Hallett's Panorama of Bath in England contained one hundred sculptured figures in different sizes to enforce a false sense of perspective on the viewer.
We have little chance for such examples in this small work, but he has brought one example from the Bath Panorama. Here he stands with painted children behind him at the clothes shop 'Caprice'.
Local residents, of whom it has been said seem even more numerous than you ever see in the streets of Salies, were all photgraphed from the balcony of the Mairie attending the saturday market below. According to their angle of perspective they were then 'transfered to this different part of the town.
You may also notice how the base of the canvas curves around the sculptered figure standing on the painted floor of the egg shaped room..
