Panorama di Thun

This is the oldest panorama painting in the world that still survives, a single continuous scene about 7 and a half metres tall and 38 metres around, wrapping the viewer in a full circle. Marquard Wocher, a painter from Basel, worked on it between 1809 and 1814, building it up from sketches he had made of the small town of Thun and the mountains behind it. The panorama itself was a new invention then, patented in the 1780s: a huge circular canvas in a purpose-built rotunda, meant to make city crowds feel they were standing somewhere else. Wocher shows Thun on an ordinary morning, down to the laundry, the market stalls and people going about their day. It still hangs in its own round pavilion in the town it pictures.