Although Mirror of Slavery doesn’t exist today, it was interesting to learn about the subject matter for the scenes. Those that do exist are never shown in their original format, either, largely due to conservation issues.Ī good portion of Ruggles’ book discusses the history of the moving panorama (as a type of art) and the scenes which appeared on Mirror of Slavery. It’s sad that few moving panoramas exist today. During the middle of the 19th century, the moving panorama was an extremely popular form of entertainment. (If you like, you can get a sense of the moving panorama idea by watching the beginning of this scene from the film “Letter from an Unknown Woman,” 1948).
In some ways, the moving panorama was the predecessor to the slide show. The paintings could then be scrolled in front of an audience, revealing a sequence of scenes. 2 Moving panoramas consisted of huge canvases (sewn together) which were displayed on a type of vertical spool. Brown commissioned a moving panorama to be painted, which he titled Mirror of Slavery. The thing that surprised me most about this book, though, was to learn how Brown decided to earn a living after escaping from slavery. One art historian commented that these images of the unboxing were “perhaps the most potent single metaphor for the displacement of the traditional image of the ‘runaway’ slave in popular imagination.” 1
Various images of Brown’s “resurrection” from his box (the one above is from Boston, 1850 (unsigned)) were used by abolitionists. I didn’t anticipate reading about art history when I picked up this book, though, but was excited to find a lot of discussion about the moving panorama, a popular form of art (and entertainment) in the mid-19th century.īefore reading this book, the only thing I knew about Brown was his escape from slavery: he climbed into a box and shipped himself from Virginia (a “slave” state) to Philadelphia (a “free” state). I’m very interested in issues of slavery/antislavery in the United States (and elsewhere), and for a long time I’ve wanted to learn more about Henry “Box” Brown. Have you ever picked up a book and pleasantly discovered that the reading was more interesting than you anticipated? I recently read The Unboxing of Henry Brown by Jeffrey Ruggles, and I ended up feeling that way.
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