The Trot, horse 'Edgington' and sulky, 1899

Eadweard Muybridge (1830 - 1904)

RA Collection: Art

Image of a trotting horse, from Muybridge's Animals in Motion... An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Progressive Movements commenced 1872, completed 1885.[ 09/2808] The accompanying caption explains that it shows:

'One Stride in eighteen phases.

enlarged from a photograph on paper, printed in 1879.

Horse "Edgington."

Length of stride:204 inches (5.15 metre). Free from contact with the ground: 66 inches (1.65 metres).

Approximate time of stride: .44 second. Strides to a mile: 310.

This series was photographed at Palo Alto, 1879, is absolutely free from "re-touching," and was synthetically reproduced, and exhibited by projection with the Zoöpraxiscope at San Francisco, 1880: at Paris, 1881; and at the Royal Institution and Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1882. '

Muybridge lectured on two occasions at the Royal Academy of Arts, first in 1882 and then in 1889. All Muybridge's lectures followed a similar pattern. He would explain his photographic apparatus and his techniques and show on screen images of animals from various periods of art history which he contrasted with slides of his photographs to highlight the differences between real and conventional movement. Muybridge then used his moving images to analyse movement in detail.