| Description | Robert Barker (1739-1806), 1792, etching, with aquatint and hand colouring in watercolour. Robert Barker was an Irish itinerant portrait painter who moved to Edinburgh in the early 1780s. The story goes that he was out walking on Calton Hill with the whole vista of the City of Edinburgh laid out before him, and he seized upon capturing the scene in the round. In 1787 he opened an exhibition in Edinburgh which was to have a major impact on the 19th and 20th century entertainment industries. It featured a panoramic view of the city painted around the inner wall of a rotunda which, when viewed from the centre of the room, gave the spectator the illusion of reality. This small, watercolour version of Barker's first full Panorama is dated 1792. Its purpose is unclear, but it is related to a set of engravings published two years later |
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