Who Painted a River?

How can anyone paint all the scenery along a river as long as the Mississippi? An American artist named John Banvard tried it in 1846, producing a painting 12 feet wide and over three miles long.

To show the painting, called Panorama of the Mississippi, Banvard rolled it around cylinders and slowly unrolled it before an audience until the entire length had been shown. The painting showed the scenery along the Mississippi for a distance of 1,200 miles. It took two hours to view the whole painting.

The smallest painting of all time was originally a landscape painted in the 1940s by an American artist. The work measured just 1/65 of a square inch in area, and was painted with a brush made out of a single human hair.

But that was topped in 1979 by Gert Twigt, a Dutch artist, whose painting, My Small Country, Holland, was painted in a circle 6/1000 of an inch in diameter.

As large as it was, Panorama of the Mississippi has since completely disappeared.

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