Thun-Panorama

In 1809 the Basel painter Marquard Wocher climbed onto a rooftop in the old town of Thun and began drawing everything he could see in a full circle. Over the following five years he turned those sketches into one continuous painting about 38 metres long and 7.5 metres high, now regarded as the oldest surviving panorama in the world.

Standing in the middle of the pavilion, you see Thun as it was around 1810, with the castle, the churches and the river Aare, and beyond them the mountains of the Bernese Oberland, among them the Niesen, the Blüemlisalp and the Jungfrau. Wocher filled the streets, yards and windows with more than 300 small figures, townspeople, country folk and foreign visitors, so a visit easily turns into a slow hunt for scenes.

He first showed it in a rotunda he built in Basel. After his death in 1830 it changed hands, ended up rolled away in storage and was largely forgotten. Rediscovered in the 1950s, it was cut into sections for restoration, bought by the Gottfried Keller Foundation, a Swiss federal art foundation, and installed in 1961 in a round pavilion in Schadau Park on the shore of Lake Thun. The pavilion was enlarged in 2015 after a further restoration.