When you visit Panorama Mesdag, you travel back in time. The 360-degree view of the dunes, the sea and the fishing village of Scheveningen allows you to step back in time and experience what it looked like in 1881.
Panorama Mesdag is the oldest 19th-century panorama painting in the world and is still on its original site. The art is cylindrical, more than 14 meters high and 120 meters in circumference. It’s so big that it’s hard to describe the experience of visiting the monument in words.
This is a place you have to visit yourself.
When planning my visit to The Hague, one of the first places that captured my attention was the Panorama Mesdag. I learned about panorama paintings when I visited Wroclaw a couple of years ago and saw the Panorama of the Battle of Racławice; the topic has been on my mind since then.
The fact that my hotel, the fantastic Carlton Ambassador, is just a block away made me sure that this would be my first tourist destination in the city.
The Panorama Mesdag was painted by Hendrik Willem Mesdag, one of the most important painters of the Hague School, with help from his friends and his wife, Sientje Mesdag-van Houten. It is vital because it is the oldest panoramic painting in its original location, but I feel its importance lies more in its topic.
Most of the panoramic paintings depicted warfare scenes; this was this art’s more universal subject. But Panorama Mesdag is entirely different since it shows the dunes in Scheveningen.
This reproduction of domestic scenery is unusual and serves, today, as a beautiful way of showing how life was at the time.
Some of the history behind the Panorama Mesdag
At the end of the 19th century, there was a craze for panorama paintings, which is why the Panorama Mesdag came to be then. Hendrik Mesdag got word from some entrepreneurs in Brussels that they wanted to invest in this with a Maritime Panorama theme.
The design started to shape in May 1881, when the building was constructed in the center of The Hague. Hendrik Mesdag had a canvas over 14 meters in height and 100 in width. The solution to fill this up was using a glass cylinder as a sketch tool and transferring the paintings into their more substantial form.
One thing that makes Panorama Mesdag important in art history is how Hendrik Mesdag used photographs to research the painting, primarily for shadows of buildings and perspective details. Before that, pictures were not easy to come by as references, but Hendrik Mesdag liked them so much that he extensively used them in his later years while working in Amsterdam.
The structure opened to the public in the center of The Hague in August 1881. The day before, another panorama opened, and around the same time, the other two panoramas opened in Rotterdam and Amsterdam.
The panorama craze was reaching its peak, and by 1885, they went bankrupt. Hendrik Willem Mesdag bought everything and operated with losses until the Modern Art Museum in The Hague took over the painting.
The Panorama Mesdag is one of The Hague’s most important tourist destinations today. And it’s a fantastic piece of artwork that everybody needs to see.
The Panorama Mesdag is open Monday through Saturday from 10:00 to 17:00. On Sundays and public holidays, it’s open from 11:00 to 17:00. Adults pay € 10.50, and ticket packages are available for those who want to visit more museums in the city.
Panorama Mesdag in The Hague
Zeestraat 65
2518 AA Den Haag
