EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE (1830-1904) PLATE 318, from ANIMAL LOCOMOTION, c. 1887 vintage collotype; 6 x 17 7/8 in. (image), 19 x 23 in. (sheet); artist, title, date & copyright info recto; Condition: Excellent; EMU-0009

Muybridge engaged in a systematic study of movement, breaking new ground in stop-motion photography. Each plate appears to show the same subject in sequential phases of one movement, like a horse galloping. The publication, Animal Locomotion contains 781 plates comprising 20,000 photographs.

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EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE
Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) emigrated to the United States as a young man and during his first decade in America he worked as a bookseller in both New York and San Francisco. While traveling in the United States, he sustained serious head injuries in a stagecoach crash in Texas, and immediately returned to the UK for a five-year period, where it is thought he took up photography. Upon his return to America, he quickly established a successful career as a landscape photographer, producing dramatic views of both Yosemite and San Francisco. In 1872, racehorse owner and former Governor of California, Leland Stanford, hired Muybridge to photograph his horse galloping to determine whether all four of the animal’s hooves were lifted off the ground at the same time, a popular debate at the time. To photograph the horse at speed, Muybridge engineered a system of multiple cameras with trip wire shutter releases to capture each stage of the movement. The project took Muybridge five years, which proved to be a turbulent period in the artist’s life. In 1874 he shot his young wife’s lover, when he discovered that he might have fathered her baby. Muybridge went to trial but was acquitted because his crime was deemed “justifiable homicide.” After the trial, Muybridge left for Central America, traveling for over a year. His wife died nine months after the trial, while Muybridge was still abroad.

After his travels, Muybridge returned to work for Stanford at his Palo Alto racetrack. In June 1878, Muybridge’s photographs proved conclusively that a galloping horse lifts all four hooves off the ground. The effects of Muybridge’s discovery were seismic. Newspapers, although not able to reproduce photographs, depicted the images as woodcuts, and Scientific American published drawings of the photographs. Artists, including Edgar Degas and Thomas Eakins began to reference the photographs in order to make their paintings closer to life. Muybridge toured Europe with his photographs, where his astonished audiences included William Gladstone, Alfred Lord Tennyson and the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII. However, when Leyland published The Horse in Motion, Muybridge’s role in the project was barely mentioned, and their relationship disintegrated. Muybridge found another sponsor for his next body of work in the University of Pennsylvania. There, Muybridge completed his most influential and enduring body of work, Animal Locomotion. Funded entirely by Penn., Muybridge engaged in a systematic study of movement, breaking new ground in both science and the emerging art form of photography. Each plate in the series shows the same subject in sequential phases of one movement. Muybridge recorded varied forms of movement in a wide range of animals (mostly taken at the Philadelphia zoo), from pigeons in flight to the subtleties of gait found in sloths, kangaroos and capybaras. Muybridge also documented human subjects engaged in walking, running, descending staircases as well as engaging in activities such as boxing, fencing, weight lifting and wrestling.

While at Penn., Muybridge developed a clockwork motor to fire the camera shutters in sequence. This meant he could document rapid or subtle motion without having to depend on the subject’s movements to trigger a shutter. Muybridge extended his original set of cameras from 12 to 24, and set up an extra two separate batteries of cameras to capture rear and angled views. Muybridge took over 20,000 photographs in the three years, and edited the final selection to 781 plates. The photographs fundamentally changed understandings of movement and Muybridge’s work from this period has contributed to the science of physiology and biomechanics. The imagery of Animal Locomotion had a profound impact on many artists, including Marcel Duchamp, Francis Bacon, Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly. Muybridge also invented the first machine to project moving photographic images. His device the “zoopraxiscope”, could be used to animate entire sequences of photographs, anticipating the rise of cinema. Muybridge returned to Britain in 1894 a celebrated figure, lecturing extensively throughout the country. He died in Kingston upon Thames in 1904. © Huxley-Parlour Gallery

Excellent

20 x 24 in