Curving a full 360° in front of you, the Gettysburg Cyclorama by French artist Paul Dominique Philippoteaux depicts Pickett's Charge, the climactic Confederate attack on Union forces at the Battle of Gettysburg on July 3, 1863. Commissioned by Chicago investors, Philippoteaux studied the battlefield and interviewed participants before completing the cyclorama in 1883. It was so compelling that a Boston version and two other major copies were produced; the Boston version was later taken to Gettysburg and displayed beginning in the 1910s.
In 1942 the National Park Service purchased the work, and after multiple restorations the cyclorama is on display here at Gettysburg National Military Park. A cyclorama is meant to surround and immerse you — a panoramic, cylindrical canvas that, often with added foreground elements, makes you feel placed into the scene. As you stand here, take in the sweep of that enormous canvas, the painstaking work of an artist who returned to the ground and to witnesses, and the layers of history that brought this Boston-made copy back to these very fields.
This Boston-made copy still immerses you in Pickett's Charge, brought home to Gettysburg after decades away.