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EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE (1830-1904)
A selection of 50 plates from
Animal Locomotion.
This outstanding collection from Muybridge’s
groundbreaking series includes figures riding and jumping horses; men wrestling, running, shooting,
playing cricket, jumping, and somersaulting, nearly all unclothed; women climbing, stepping,
dancing, and ascending stairs, also primarily unclothed; and animals, including a sloth, deer, a jaguar,
birds, and a camel. Also includes a self-portrait of Muybridge hammering and sawing. Collotypes,
the images a variety of sizes, but measuring approximately 6
5
/
8
x17
3
/
8
inches (16.8x44.1 cm.), and
smaller, the two-toned sheets 19x24 inches (48.3x61 cm.), all but one with Muybridge’s letterpress
credit, series titles, plate number, copyright, and date on recto. 1887
[30,000/45,000]
In an historic era of western expansion and industrial innovation, Eadweard Muybridge was a
visionary photographer who forever changedVictorian notions of movement and time.
Eccentric and adventurous, the British-born artist first photographed San Francisco (including a
sweeping 6-foot long panorama) and the remote Yosemite Valley in the 1860s. By the following
decade, he pushed photography’s boundaries even further by developing ways in which multiple
cameras could be used to capture locomotion in real time. (Apparently he set out to capture
movement after he was commissioned by Leland Stanford, the former Governor of California, to
satisfy a bet about whether all four horses’ legs leave the ground as it trots or gallops.)
Subsequently Muybridge was supported by the University of Pennsylvania to develop motion studies
depicting humans and animals. Between 1883 and 1886 he produced an astounding 100,000