US war painting gets epic restoration

GETTYSBURG (Pennsylvania) (AFP) - After years of exposure to rot and mishandling, a US institution has been pulled back from the brink of collapse with the help of international experts who pooled their knowledge.

But this rescue package had nothing to do with Wall Street.

Instead, it was about a massive 360-degree panorama depicting a key US Civil War battle fought in farmland in Pennsylvania, which was painted 125 years ago by French artist Paul Philippoteaux.

When the painting, called “The Battle of Gettysburg”, was first unveiled in 1884, 21 years after the campaign it depicts, it was the total immersion experience of the era, a sort of 19th-century version of surround-sound-and-vision cinema.

But after more than 100 years of mishandling and exposure to moisture, rot and fire, the gigantic painting had not only lost some of its IMAX effect but also entire sections.

Its circumference had shrunk from 377 feet to 359 feet (115 meters to 109 meters), and its height from 42 feet to 27 feet.

Five years ago the Gettysburg Foundation launched “the largest conservation project of its kind ever undertaken in North America” to save Philippoteaux’s epic work, which portrays one of the bloodiest battles ever on US soil, in which some 51,000 people lost their lives in three days.