Blockbusters before cinema even existed
The promoters of weren't to know, but there was to be just a narrow 10-year window of success for the art, before moving pictures came along and blew the whole thing out of the water.
For that brief period, these paintings were blockbusters, decades before that word was even used in an entertainment sense.
The Australasian newspaper, in the customary florid prose of the day, described the experience of viewing the Gettysburg painting more enticingly than any advertisement could.
"A young lady who goes to the exhibition regularly once a week, plants herself in front of the ghastly details of the hospital scene, and contemplates them steadfastly until she faints," the newspaper reported.
You can't buy advertising like that.
The Battle of Waterloo even boasted a "real life" veteran of the battle.
Jeremiah Brown, said by promoters to be close to 100 years old, would tell stories and "fight his battle o'er again" for the paying customers.
"His memory is bears grand testimony to the general correctness of the details of the painting," reported the Ovens and Murray Advertiser.
Unfortunately, Jeremiah Brown was later shown to be a fraud and was, in fact, four years old at the time of the Battle of Waterloo.
"That's Hollywood for you before Hollywood had been invented,"
The paintings were extraordinary in their depth and detail, but they had one fatal flaw: they didn't move.
When cinemas, showing moving pictures, began operating in Australia — first in Sydney, then in Melbourne in 1896 — the days of were numbered.
Moving pictures had an unfair advantage over the massive paintings: they were real.
"The impression is so perfect that you might on the slightest provocation stretch out your hand to check the pedestrian who is within an ace of being run down by a bus," reported the Ovens and Murray Advertiser.
The promoters were fighting an unwinnable battle against technology.
"They were losing money and instead of charging two shillings or five shillings, they were charging one shilling,"
Not only were the cinemas showing actual people and events, they could rotate their films far more often than the promoters could rotate their enormous, cumbersome works.
The two in Melbourne persisted for just a few years into the 1900s before closing for good.
The Fitzroy building stood for another 20 years, and was used as an athletics and boxing pavilion before it was demolished.
A new life
In Little Collins Street was used as a bicycle school before the building later became part of George Department Store.
In 1995 the Little Collins Street underwent a major renovation to become luxury apartments,
Unintentionally, or by design, the iron rings incorporated into the building's impressive skylight are reminders of its past life. Before cinema even existed?
There are stronger clues if you venture into the building's underground car park, with its distinctly curved walls.
It takes imagination to picture the space with a floor to ceiling painting of the Siege of Paris or some other event, but you can manage it if you try hard enough. Before cinemas existed, this is where you'd go to see the latest blockbuster
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