HOLLAND:The world-famous Dutch Panorama Mesdag, a vast 19th-century 360-degrees painting, covering a square mile of canvas and attracting hundreds of thousands of admirers annually, is in danger of collapse.
The unique work, housed in a purpose-built rotunda in The Hague, has started to shift and subside, and all because the city needs more off-street parking.
Lovers of the mesmerising panorama are horrified and directors of the Mesdag museum have now gone to court to save it. They are seeking injunctions against the municipality and the builders to halt construction work on a two-floor indoor car park next door to Panorama Mesdag, the oldest panorama in the world.
The work, completed in 1881 by Hendrik Willem Mesdag, helped by his wife Sientje and a team of painters, has started to subside by as much as 7mm in places, more than twice the permitted level, since builders moved in to an adjacent building to dig a new underground car park.
The car park conversion had been licensed by The Hague's municipality but directors of the museum are asking the court to order the work to be stopped, pending an urgent independent investigation to determine the effects on the work.
Panorama Mesdag's director Marijke de Jong warned that already, in the initial digging stages and before the effects of the heaviest building work could be felt, the painting had started to sag and subside.
Listed as a historic monument, Panorama Mesdag measures 120m in length and is 14m high. Adding to the illusion of stepping inside the painting, visitors, who view the circular panorama from a platform, view the seaside village of Scheveningen of the late 19th century, complete with faux terrain of real tufts of grass and beach, with scraps of driftwood, a rusty anchor and fishing nets.
The car park's builders are said to have expressed worries that the famous work could be damaged during the construction phase but the municipality granted a licence, stipulating that a small space be preserved between the two buildings. The Panorama Mesdag building stands on 16 steel columns supported by foundation blocks.