panorama [L18th] In 1788 the painter Robert Barker invented the panorama, a spectacular method for presenting a large painting of a landscape or other scene. It could either be arranged on the inside of a cylinder and viewed from the inside, or be unrolled and made to pass in front of the viewer to show the various parts in succession. The first such picture was of a view of Edinburgh. By the early 1800s panorama had come into wider use as ‘a complete and comprehensive survey or presentation of a subject’, and ‘an unbroken view of the whole region surrounding an observer’. Barker formed the word from Greek pan ‘all’ and horama ‘view’. The cinematic term pan [E20] for a shot following someone or showing surrounding views is a shortening of panorama.