Whaling Panorama Restored

In 1848, when the New England maritime artist Benjamin Russell and sign painter Caleb Purlington unveiled . The pair's collaboration, in tempera on a canvas 8.5 feet high and 1,238 feet long, carries viewers from the harbor in New Bedford, Massachusetts, to locales ranging from the Cape Verde Islands and Rio de Janeiro to Cape Horn and Tahiti, along with images of the pursuit, killing, flensing, or skinning, and rendering of cetaceans for their oil and byproducts. The New Bedford Whaling Museum——accepted the painting as a donation from a local grocer in 1918; until recently, the canvas had languished in storage. Now the museum has restored the panorama, which is too fragile for display, and made stills that producers organized into a film. New Bedford's Kinburn Textile Mill will showcase the work in a setting mimicking the 19th-century theatrical presentation through October 8, 2018.