Cycloramic murals—building-sized paintings hung circularly for viewing from the inside—were a European innovation of the late nineteenth century. Frenchman Paul Philippoteaux supervised the painting of a cyclorama of the Battle of Gettysburg, which came to this country in 1884 and remains a prominent attraction at the Gettysburg National Military Park.
German artists also produced cycloramas, such as those depicting battles of the Franco-Prussian War. A number of them were recruited to America in 1883 by William Wehner of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who ran the American Panorama Company, dedicated to cycloramic art. Thirteen artists painted The Battle of Missionary Ridge in 1883-84 and then turned to the Battle of Atlanta as the subject for their next mural. The company's choice of subject was influenced by one patron, the Republican Illinois senator John A. Logan, who ran unsuccessfully for vice president in 1884 and was rumored to be a candidate for the presidential nomination in 1888. A former Union general, Logan commanded the Fifteenth Corps in the Battle of Atlanta and assumed command of the Army of the Tennessee after the death of General James B. McPherson.
In the summer of 1885 the Milwaukee artists came to Atlanta for field study. Twenty years after the war, histories of the battle were in print, but the artists received most of the technical advice from Union and Confederate veterans. Assisting was Theodore Davis, wartime illustrator for Harper's Weekly, who had followed General William T. Sherman's armies. With trench lines outside Atlanta still extant, the artists fixed as the point of reference a site just inside Union lines at the Georgia Railroad, running eastward from the city. From a forty-foot tower they studied the terrain and sketched layouts. After several months on site, they returned to their Milwaukee studio, where, supervised by F. W. Heine and August Lohr, the artists—all specialists in landscapes, figures, and animals—completed the painting.
At its debut in Detroit in February 1887, the work was billed as "Logan's Great Battle" (although the senator had died three months before). The heavy canvases were draped on wooden frames, which were moved and reassembled at Minneapolis, Minnesota, and then Indianapolis, Indiana, where the Cyclorama opened in May 1888. Wehner sold the painting to an Indianapolis art exhibit company, which in turn sold it in 1890 to Paul Atkinson of Madison, Georgia.
Atkinson, already the owner of the Missionary Ridge cyclorama, sent the Atlanta painting to Chattanooga, Tennessee, and brought the former to Atlanta, exhibiting it in a circular building on Edgewood Avenue until February 1892. Missionary Ridge then traveled to Nashville, Tennessee, where it was later destroyed in a hurricane; in its place, The Battle of Atlanta opened in Atlanta on February 22, 1892. Resale to various owners led to its purchase at the Edgewood Avenue exhibition hall by Atlanta businessman George V. Gress, who donated the painting to the city in March 1898 after providing it with housing in Grant Park. Grant Park is a public park established in 1883 and named for Atlantan Lemuel P. Grant, the donor of the park land, who as a Confederate engineer had surveyed for the fortifications around Atlanta.
The painting takes in a wide sweep of the area: the skyline of Atlanta, Kennesaw Mountain, Stone Mountain, and the smoke of a cavalry fight at Decatur. Details of the battle are as if the viewer stood just inside the Fifteenth Corps lines at about 4:30 p.m. on July 22.
The Cyclorama has been housed at Grant Park since the 1890s. In 1921 a new building, designed by Atlanta architect John Francis Downing, took in the painting and, six years later, the locomotive Texas, famous in the Andrews Raid of 1862. In 1934-36, funded by the Works Progress Administration, artists Weis Snell, Joseph Llorens, and Wilbur Kurtz fashioned plaster figures for a diorama as foreground for the painting. Set on a flooring of red clay, the shrubbery, cannon, track, and 128 soldiers (twenty inches to fifty inches tall, to fit in perspective with the scale of the painting), give the painting more realism and extend it thirty feet toward the viewing platform. After Clark Gable visited the Cyclorama in December 1939 while in Atlanta for the premiere of Gone With the Wind, Mayor William B. Hartsfield had Snell make a figure of a Union corpse with a face painted to resemble Gable's Rhett Butler.
Deterioration of the painting and water damage led to an $11 million restoration of the Cyclorama in 1979-81. Under the supervision of Gustav Berger, the canvas was cleaned and treated, and the paint colors were restored. In the diorama the clay was replaced with a fiberglass and plastic flooring by Joseph Hurt (a descendant of Troup Hurt), and the plaster figures were reset. The building was remodeled and equipped with a 184-seat, tiered viewing platform, which rotates slowly as recorded narrative describes the painting. The upstairs museum was also updated, with artifacts given mostly by a former Cyclorama employee. The new Cyclorama reopened in June 1982 and continues to draw visitors from around the world.
The Battle of Atlanta: The Cyclorama, Grant Park, Atlanta, Georgia (Kansas City, Mo.: Terrell Publishing, 1982-1991?; distributed by Thomas Warren Enterprises).
Barry L. Brown and Gordon R. Elwell, Crossroads of Conflict: A Guide to Civil War Sites in Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010).
Chip Carter, "Atlanta's Restored Cyclorama," Civil War Times Illustrated, January-February 1991, 18-22.
Harold Holzer and Mark E. Neely Jr., Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: The Civil War in Art (New York: Orion Books, 1993), esp. ch. 5, "The Theater of the War: Cycloramas and Panoramic Art."
Alma Hill Jamison, "The Cyclorama of the Battle of Atlanta," Atlanta Historical Bulletin 10 (July 1937): 58-75.
Wilbur G. Kurtz, "At the Troup Hurt House," Atlanta Constitution Magazine, January 25, 1931.
Wilbur G. Kurtz, "The Story of the Cyclorama Painting," in The Atlanta Cyclorama of the Battle of Atlanta (Atlanta: City of Atlanta, 1954), 24-28.
Stephen Davis, Marietta
A project of the Georgia Humanities Council, in partnership with the University of Georgia Press, the University System of Georgia/GALILEO, and the Office of the Governor.