Table Mountain and the Panorama

The emergence of the panorama - a technical invention of the late eighteenth century - came at a time when military and scientific surveillance at the Cape demanded more specific and differentiated views of the occupied landscape and Europe's colonial possessions. Within this context the panorama was part of an imperial discourse that framed the landscape in terms of fixed frontier relations wherein the observer could safely travel. The elevated perspective of the most fashionable panoramas not only offered a complete view of the horizon, but also a sense of disengagement from all the human frailties and follies within the pictured scene. As a result, the panoptic vision usually obscures, or at least ignores, problematic issues.

Table Mountain was more than a topographical backdrop for these panoramas, it was the perimeter and periphery that defined the landscape as a wilderness or parkland in which the leisured pastimes of the artist-as-interloper can be exercised. As Michael Godby (1992) demonstrated in his lucid study of nineteenth-century depictions of a picturesque Cape Town, the travelling artist who eventually settled at the Cape relied less on observable 'facts' and more on expressive 'feelings'.

The Future is not what it was.

Bernard Levin

The Sunday Times 22 May 1977

Table Mountain and the Future
Index