3 The Vision Scene: Revelation

and Remediation
Frank Gray

The vision scene is a particular visual trope that has had a long presence within
the histories of Western visual art, photography, theater, and film. It was employed
visually and narratively to represent either a character’s thoughts and feelings or
her/his encounters with the divine and the supernatural. The depicted vision
could be of many things—memories, dreams, nightmares, anxieties, or desires.
Usually the visionary and her/his vision were composed within the same picture
plane (or scene), with the vision presented either as an integrated element of the
main image/scene or as a separate yet contiguous second image/scene (a picture-­
within-a-picture). The presence of the vision scene, therefore, created a symbiotic
relationship between itself and the main image. The two images (or scenes) were
conjoined, copresent, and codependent, and as such, they together represented
a hybrid image that existed because of this relationship and this combination of
elements. Here might be, simultaneously, the dreamer and the dreamed, the con-
scious and the unconscious, and the natural and the supernatural.
This chapter is dedicated to understanding the multiple uses and manifesta-
tions of the vision scene in the nineteenth century and its emergence into film
practice in the early twentieth century. It was particularly prominent in this
period, as it was found across a considerable range of two-dimensional media
(paintings, watercolors, prints, photographs, book illustrations, stereographs,
and postcards) as well as in the narrative-based and temporally driven practices
of theatre, opera, the magic lantern, and film. The dream, in particular, is the
subject that dominates a great deal of this visual imagery.
The late eighteenth century witnessed a fascination with visions and their
depiction through the media of painting, print, watercolor, and the phantasma-
goria. Romantic artists such as Blake, Fuseli, and Goya and their apparitions are
central to this history. The visions in this period were not only inspired by canon-
ical literature but also drawn from the artists’ own imagination. Jacob’s dream
from the Old Testament is a good example of the former. It provided the impetus
for William Blake’s Jacob’s Dream, a watercolor of about 1799–1806.1 Jacob lies
asleep in the foreground and above him arises the spiral ladder that unifies the
 The Vision Scene | 37

earth with heaven. For Jacob, this dream vision was proof of the existence of the
spiritual realm; here was the ladder to heaven and to God. (Gustave Doré’s wood
engraving of the same scene would feature within his collection of illustrations
for the English Bible in 1868.) By contrast, Henry Fuseli’s iconic painting The
Nightmare (1782) is overtly secular, sexual, and demonic in nature. He fashioned
a terrifying dream that marries a sleeping young woman with an incubus on
her chest and a wild-eyed peering horse.2 Equally famous is The Sleep of Reason
Produces Monsters, Francisco Goya’s aquatint from 1797–99. Its commentary
states, “Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters: united
with her, she is the mother of the arts and the source of their wonders.”3 All
three examples bring together the dreamer and the dreamed into a single uni-
fied composition, and they offered a compositional framework in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries for the representation of the dream, most notably
within two subjects—the Soldier’s Dream and the Artist’s Dream. It is within
these two dream tropes that the formal device of the picture-within-a-picture
(the double image) would become very prominent.
The Soldier’s Dream has an intermedial history that encompasses painting,
engraving, ceramics, and film. Often this double image was placed within the
context of accompanying prose, poetry, music, and song. J. M. W. Turner’s water-
color, The Soldier’s Dream, about 1835, is one of earliest examples. It was exe-
cuted as part of his creation of a series of twenty vignettes for the anthology, The
Poetical Works of Thomas Campbell (1837), which included Campbell’s poem The
Soldier’s Dream of 1804. The poem had been written during the British involve-
ment in the Napoleonic wars. Turner’s watercolour presents a soldier on duty
at nighttime and below him his vision—a scene of home and family bathed in
sunlight.4 Subsequent appearances of the Soldier’s Dream would offer variations
on the same composition and resonate with contemporary military conflicts. For
example, the woodcut The Soldier’s Dream was published in the weekly British
periodical Punch in 1854. Set at the very start of the Crimean War, the sleeping
soldier dreams of two contrasting events: his service on the front line and the
penury faced by soldiers’ families at home.5 A year later, Edward Goodall cre-
ated The Soldier’s Dream of Home (1855), a mezzotint based upon a design by his
son Frederick and also inspired by Campbell’s poem. Out of the smoke from the
night fire, the dream image of home hovers above the sleeping soldier.6 It is highly
likely that this Soldier’s Dream, both as a print and as a hand-painted lantern
slide, influenced the creation of American versions that circulated throughout
the American Civil War, such as Nathaniel Currier and James Merritt Ives’ litho-
graph, The Soldier’s Dream of Home (ca. 1861–1865).7
Edouard Detaille’s painting, The Dream (1888) brought a new sense of
monumentality and national purpose to the Soldier’s Dream. This vast work
(300 cm × 400 cm) depicts French soldiers sleeping and their dream of rising up
38 | The Image in Early Cinema

against Germany and restoring honor to the nation after the defeat of 1870–1871.
Its political capital was established through its purchase by the French state,
its exhibition at the Musée du Luxembourg and its subsequent long circula-
tion as a print and as a postcard.8 More generally, postcards from the 1890s to
the First World War would also exploit the subject of the Soldier’s Dream as
would the variant—a soldier’s family and its dream of their loved one serving
in the armed forces. The increasing popularity and familiarity of the Soldier’s
Dream no doubt influenced the production of Robert Paul’s two-scene film, His
Mother’s Portrait; or, The Soldier’s Vision (1900). A wounded British soldier dur-
ing the Anglo-Boer War dreams of his “mother at home praying for her son,”
and his vision of her appears above him in the sky.9 He is rescued and it is dis-
covered that the metal-cased portrait of his mother that he takes from her on
his departure from England for South Africa (scene 1) has saved his life. Paul,
in this instance, inserted the vision into a defined film narrative and, by doing
so, used the new medium of film to provide a structured dramatic context for
the dream vision’s use. The Soldier’s Dream presents a very particular social and
military iconography, where the vision worked to serve the narratives of nation,
war, patriotism, and family.
Akin to the Soldier’s Dream is the Artist’s Dream. Various iterations of it
are found throughout the nineteenth century and like the Soldier’s Dream, the
double image of the dreamer and the dreamed (the picture with a picture) is
very prominent. Three early Victorian painters played a significant role in the
establishment of this trope. Charles Eastlake’s The Artist’s Dream (1845) features
a sleeping artist imagining being awarded a prize by the Queen. Edward Henry
Corbould’s The Artist’s Dream (ca. 1853) presents an artist asleep in front of his
easel and a dream image of his visual world, uniting elements of the natural and
the supernatural. John Anster Fitzgerald’s The Artist’s Dream (1857) is very simi-
lar. Its composition is effectively divided in two. On the right-hand side, in focus,
is the artist asleep in his chair. On the left, in soft focus, is his ethereal dream
of himself painting a model while elves and goblins encircle him.10 In 1893, the
magician David Devant devised in a most spectacular fashion a stage interpreta-
tion of this trope for London’s Egyptian Hall. Entitled The Artist’s Dream, this
dramatized magic act introduced the artist mourning the loss of his late wife
as he sits next to his full-length portrait of her. While he sleeps, his dream is
revealed to the audience when his wife materializes out of the painting and onto
the stage, where she offers him consoling words.11 A version of Devant’s illusion
was presented in New York in the next year by the magician Professor Hermann.
Charles Musser has identified it as an important source for An Artist’s Dream/
The Artist’s Dream, the seventy-five-foot, single-shot film made for the Edison
Company in early 1900. The film represents a very early instance of the Artist’s
Dream on film. As the artist sleeps, the Devil orchestrates a set of fantastic and
 The Vision Scene | 39

frenzied actions made possible on film by stop motion. The Artist’s Dilemma
(1900) by J. Stuart Blackton and Albert E. Smith for Edison is similar in both
nature and form.12 What is important to mark is that Devant and the filmmakers
were introducing a vision scene into a temporal, narrative space. As such, they
were both reimagining and animating the Artist’s Dream.
In his study of the relationship between nineteenth-century theater and early
cinema, Nicholas Vardac drew attention to the vision scene, or vision effect as he
called it, as a significant part of the spectacle of the Victorian stage, emphasizing
its use in the work of Boucicault, Irving, and within pantomime. Vardac described
the vision scene as, “the popular method for depicting the internal state of a char-
acter.”13 The ubiquity of the vision scene suggests that theater audiences were
familiar with this trope and its function. Charles Kean’s London production of
Shakespeare’s Henry VIII in 1855 is an intriguing example. It created the moment
of Queen Catherine’s death and the arrival of angels possibly either through the
use of Pepper’s Ghost (a mirror below stage and angled glass on stage) or the
projection of lantern slides, or conceivably a mixture of the two. It was resonant
with earlier interpretations of the very same supernatural scene in paint (Fuseli)
and watercolor (Blake).14 Probably the most enduring vision scene for the British
stage was the one created by the actor-manager Henry Irving for his own play,
The Bells. Performed continuously for over 30 years (from 1871 to 1905), the scene
appeared at the end of Act 1 and was captured in an engraving from December
1871.15 Mathias in the present, on stage in the foreground downstage left, remem-
bers his past: the moment he murdered and robbed Koveski, the Polish Jew. This
memory is visualized and dramatized on stage by being presented as a separate
site of action behind Mathias. The audience was therefore confronted, simulta-
neously, with Mathias’ present and his past. This embedded vision scene repre-
sented an externalization of his suppressed memory. The migration of the vision
scene across the nineteenth century from its use within the two-dimensional
imagery of paintings and prints to its employment within the multidimensional
spaces of the stage and the screen was motivated very clearly by a recognition of
its dramatic value, a desire to reconfigure it within a narrative structure and to
reimagine it through the uses of stagecraft, stage magic, and the newly invented
special effects for film (stop motion).
As intimated above, vision imagery also has a defined place within the his-
tories of photography and photography-related media: the magic lantern, the
stereograph, and the postcard. These histories are significant because they all
combined not only to spread an awareness of the vision scene as a formal device
among photographers but also, through its many applications, to further establish
its public currency. The photographic vision usually consisted of a main image to
which other elements were added through superimposition in order to create a
new, formally unified and enigmatic whole. It was these superimposed elements
40 | The Image in Early Cinema

that could also alter and make strange the main image. This multiple-image
work was usually created either through the combination of properly exposed
and underexposed elements onto the same negative in-camera or through the
creation of a composite image by the combination of two or more negatives onto
the same positive plate/paper. Composite photography, what we would now refer
to as photomontage, became very well established within Victorian photography.
It was through an understanding of this practice that vision scenes were incor-
porated into photography.
Henry Peach Robinson, a British photographer, was an important advocate
of composite photography. He was instrumental in cultivating its importance and
employing his term for the concept: combination printing. His public lectures,
articles, many publications beginning with Pictorial Effect in Photography (1869),
and the exhibition of his own photographs all contributed to the development
and professionalization of photographic culture in Britain. Robinson believed
that photography could aspire to become a new art form through the combina-
tion of elements and that this should become an essential part of the photome-
chanical image-making process. It was for him, “a method which enables the
photographer to represent objects in different planes in proper focus, to keep
the true atmospheric and linear relation of varying distances, and by which a
picture can be divided into separate portions for execution, the parts to be after-
wards printed together on one paper.”16 Fading Away (1859), with its marriage of
five separate negatives, exemplified his refined approach and demonstrated, for
Robinson, composite photography’s value and potential. From his purist perspec-
tive, he was also concerned about the misuse of composite photography. He said,
“It is true that combination printing, allowing, as it does much greater liberty to
the photographer, and much greater facilities for representing the truth of nature,
also admits, from these very facts, of a wide latitude for abuse.”17 The wide-spread
adoption of composite photography or combination printing of course nurtured
the very “abuse” that Robinson feared, especially through the advent of trick pho-
tography, spirit photography, and photographically created vision scenes.
The magic lantern, as a technology and as a cultural practice, became an
important site both for the use and display of combination printing and, through
it, the realization of vision scenes. For example, the English company Bamforth
produced a range of commercial, photographic lantern slide sets in the late nine-
teenth century dedicated to the use of this trope. As in photography, the magic
lantern vision was created through the use of superimposition in the creation of
a composite single slide. In addition, the lanternist, by using either multiple lan-
terns or a lantern with multiple lenses, could also create a layered image made up
of different slides that would combine on screen. This live vision mixing enabled
angels, for example, to appear and disappear within the context of a vision
slide sequence. Three examples from Bamforth identify this English company’s
 The Vision Scene | 41

characteristic use of the vision scene. In Catterina: A Pathetic Story (1893), an old
man tells children stories from the New Testament, and as he speaks, illustra-
tions of these wonders appear within the composition on the door to his right
and dissolve in and out of view. In this case, the image of the speaker and listen-
ers formed a master image that remained constant on the screen while the bibli-
cal illustrations were superimposed sequentially onto a section of this master
image. The result was to imagine that the set of second images were the ones
the children imagined as they listened to the stories. In Daddy (1896), a father
and his daughter sit within an interior and mourn the loss of his wife and her
mother. In a composite slide, the departed relative appears as an angel above
them. Come Back to Erin (1902) depicts a young man sitting by a fireside remem-
bering his loved one and hoping that she returns to him in Erin/Ireland. His
thought is made tangible by a slide that combines this same scene with an image
of his beloved hovering above him.18 These uses of the vision scene by lanternists
were also utilized by early filmmakers.
George Albert Smith, the English magic lanternist and filmmaker, is a key fig-
ure in relation to the introduction of the vision scene into film. Vision scenes played
an integral role in four films that Smith made in 1898: Santa Claus, Cinderella,
Faust and Mephistopheles, and The Corsican Brothers. These one-minute, silent film
versions of established stories concentrated on those key “vision” moments within
the original source texts that were the most magical in nature. In Smith’s films, the
vision scene was the product of double printing and, with the visual evidence from
the surviving two films Santa Claus and Cinderella, it is revealed as an inset second
image within a circular mask that was positioned in the upper right-hand side of
the frame. In each film, the vision appeared momentarily on a dark ground within
the main image, actions took place within it, and then it disappeared.
Santa Claus had its origins in the poem Twas the Night before Christmas
(1822) and had become a popular subject within illustrated children’s books.
The use of the vision in Santa Claus involves two children asleep in their bed-
room on Christmas Eve. It was described as a “dream-vision . . . showing Santa
Claus on the housetops in the snow.” As such, it functioned both as the children’s
dream image (their desire) as well as a cross-cut to the parallel action on the roof
of their home (fig. 3.1). In Cinderella—a multimedia text with a history span-
ning fairy tales, illustrated children’s books, and stage pantomimes—the Fairy
Godmother visits Cinderella and reveals to her, “on the wall a beautiful vision of
the Prince dancing a minuet with her at the Palace.” Smith’s vision in Faust and
Mephistopheles operated in a similar fashion. Mephistopheles presents to Faust
what he desires: a “charming moving vision of Marguerite at spinning-wheel in
the garden.” This scene was derived directly from Act 1 of Gounod’s opera Faust,
which was first performed in Paris in 1859 and then in London in 1863 (fig. 3.2).
The vision in The Corsican Brothers was inspired by Henry Irving’s production of
42 | The Image in Early Cinema

Fig. 3.1 The vision scene in G. A. Smith’s Santa Claus, 1898. Courtesy of BFI National Archive.

the play (first performed 1880), and it operates within the film’s main image as a
form of crosscutting, for it presents the death of one twin brother to the other at
the moment it occurs.19
Smith’s uses of the vision scene reveals that for him, it did not have a single
function. In Cinderella and Faust and Mephistopheles, the vision is the creation
 The Vision Scene | 43

Fig. 3.2 The vision scene in Gounod’s Faust (c. 1870). Courtesy of Screen Archive South East.

of a supernatural agency that conjures up an image of desire for the respective

protagonists. In The Corsican Brothers, it is the supernatural bond between the
twin brothers that enables one, through the vision, to see the fate of the other. As
in Santa Claus, this was also crosscutting in filmic terms—enabling the viewer
to see two actions that are occurring simultaneously in different physical spaces.
The vision in Santa Claus, as mentioned, also operates as a dream image. These
multiple uses of the vision scene by Smith demonstrates his understanding of
its different manifestations within a range of media, the utility of combination
44 | The Image in Early Cinema

printing as found in photography and the magic lantern, the creative and techni-
cal challenge a vision scene posed in terms of its use within film and its value as
a popular commercial attraction.
The technical changes that enabled filmmakers to make longer films sparked
a new style of filmmaking, and this had an immediate impact on the uses of
vision scenes. James Williamson’s film The Little Match Seller (1902), drawn from
the short tale The Little Match Girl (1845) by Hans Christian Anderson, is a good
example of this change. It runs just over three minutes and is a work of sustained
complexity. It is composed of not one but a set of visions that are integrated into
the main scene. It is the story of the last moments of a young girl’s life on a snowy
New Year’s Eve as she dies of malnutrition and hypothermia. Through the act of
lighting a set of matches, Anderson described how each, “blazed up, and where
the light fell upon the wall, it became transparent like gauze, and she could see
right through it into the room.”20 It is this room within her imagination where
the little girl sees her desires, her memories, and her hope to be rescued from her
terrible plight. With her last match extinguished, she dies and a winged angel
appears and carries her soul up and out of the frame toward heaven. The Little
Match Seller is a significant early composite film because of its use of an inte-
grated sequence of five superimpositions (the product of double printing) and a
continuous snow-falling effect. The subjective point of view of the dying child
is the film’s purpose—for the viewer to simultaneously see what she sees. An
important companion to this work is Robert Paul’s Scrooge, or, Marley’s Ghost
(1901). Like the Williamson film, it was an adaptation of a well-established liter-
ary work (namely Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol of 1843). It is structured
around three visions, each one being within a narrative sequence devoted to a
different moment in Scrooge’s life. This use of the vision scene to signify specific
memories and feelings would also be utilized in films such as Life of American
Fireman (Edwin Porter, 1903), The Old Chorister (James Williamson, 1904), and
Fireside Reminiscences (Edwin Porter, 1908). For example, in Porter’s Life of the
American Fireman, the very first shot of the film features a fireman asleep in a
chair, and his thoughts are revealed in a self-contained circular vignette to the
right to him. This vision, or “dream bubble,” depicts a mother and her child,
and it can connote both his love for his own family and their welfare, as well
as all of the loved ones whose lives can be threatened by a domestic fire. Unlike
Smith’s vision films of 1898, these films by Williamson, Paul, and Porter offer
good examples of the formal move toward longer, less compressed, causally
driven narratives. It is this change that saw the vision scene begin to move from
being the sole focus of attention in a film to being repositioned as an integrated
element within a narrative structure.
This synoptic history of the vision scene as laid out here can be summarized as
artists finding intriguing and often complicated solutions to the challenges posed
 The Vision Scene | 45

by visualizing and narrativizing thoughts, feelings, and uncanny encounters.

From painting to print to stage to photography and to projected slides and films,
this migration signifies an enduring fascination with the use of visions within spe-
cific media as well as their remediation across media. Through superimposition
and juxtaposition, it was used within very particular pictorial and dramaturgical
methodologies that enabled a viewer to see simultaneously the external and the
internal worlds: to see a subject as well as her/his dreams. As a concept and as a
practice, the vision scene would continue to motivate artists in the twentieth cen-
tury, especially within surrealism and its multiple styles and forms of expression.

Frank Gray is Director of Screen Archive South East at the University of

Brighton. He is coeditor, along with Kaveh Askari, Scott Curtis, Louis Pelletier,
Tami Williams, and Joshua Yumibe, of Performing New Media, 1890–1915.

Notes

1. William Blake, Jacob’s Ladder, or Jacob’s Dream (c. 1799–1806), Tate Britain, London.
2. Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare (1782), Detroit Institute of Arts. Blake and Fuseli’s place
within Romanticism and its representation of the dream are subjects within Martin Myrone,
Christopher Frayling and Marina Warner, Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic
Imagination (London: Tate, 2006).
3. Francisco Goya, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (1797–1798), plate 43 with
commentary from Los Caprichos (New York: Dover, 1969) (unpaginated).
4. J. M. W. Turner, The Soldier’s Dream (c. 1835), Tate Britain, London.
5. The Soldier’s Dream, Punch (April 1, 1854): 131 (attributed to John Tenniel).
6. A hand-painted lantern slide of The Soldier’s Dream after the Goodall print is found in
the collection of La Cinémathèque Française, Paris.
7. Nathaniel Currier and James Merritt Ives, The Soldier’s Dream of Home (c. 1861–1865),
Library of Congress, Washington.
8. Edouard Detaille, The Dream (1888), Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
9. See John Barnes, The Beginnings of the Cinema in England 1894–1901, 5, 1900 (Exeter:
University of Exeter Press, 1997), 9, 190–191.
10. Charles Eastlake’s The Artist’s Dream (1845), Cardiff City Hall; Edward Henry
Corbould’s The Artist’s Dream (c. 1853), Bristol Museum & Art Gallery; John Anster
Fitzgerald’s The Artist’s Dream (1857): illustrated within Jeremy Maas, et al., Victorian Fairy
Painters (London: Merrell Holberton, 1997), 114–115.
11. The scenario for Devant’s The Artist’s Dream is found within David Devant, My Magic
Life (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1931), 230–233. Lynda Nead provides a detailed intermedial
study of The Artist’s Dream in The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography, and Film around
1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 86–88.
12. Charles Musser, Edison Motion Pictures, 1890–1900 (Washington: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1997), 583–584, 647.
13. Nicholas Vardac, Stage to Screen (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1949), 35.
46 | The Image in Early Cinema

14. Engraving of the vision scene from Kean’s production of Henry VIII, London,
Illustrated London News (2 June 1855).
15. Engravings of the vision scene in The Bells; David Mayer, Henry Irving and the Bells
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), 46–47.
16. H. P. Robinson, Pictorial Effect in Photography: being hints on Composition and
Chiaroscuro for Photographers to which is added a chapter on Combination Printing, (London:
Piper & Carter, 1869), 192. Mia Fineman explores the history of photographic manipulation in
Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop (New York: The Metropolitan Museum
of Art, 2012).
17. Ibid., 198.
18. These slide sets are found within Lucerna—the Magic Lantern Web Resource,
http://www.slides.uni-trier.de.
19. Quotations from the catalogue descriptions found within John Barnes, Pioneers
of the British Film, The Beginnings of the Cinema in England 1894–1901, 3, 1898, (London:
Bishopsgate Press, 1983), 191–192.
20. “The Little Match Girl,” Fairy Tales from Hans Christian Andersen (London:
J. M. Dent & Co., 1906), 142.