Plate Number 241. Placing a chair, sitting and reading
Medium
collotype
Dimensions
image: 30.9 × 24.6 cm (12 3/16 × 9 11/16 in.) sheet: 47.63 × 60.33 cm (18 3/4 × 23 3/4 in.)
Classification
Photograph
Department
CPH
Museum
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Credit
Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase, 1887)
Accession Number
2014.79.274
Rights
Public Domain
Art Historical Context
Eadweard Muybridge *Plate Number 241. a chair, sitting and reading* (1887) captures a sequence of everyday human motion through his groundbreaking chronophotography technique. Part of his monumental *Animal Locomotion*, comprising 781 plates, this collotype print freezes a figure mid-action: positioning a chair, settling into it, and beginning to read. Muybridge, a pioneering photographer, used a battery of up to 24 cameras triggered by electromagnetic shutters to dissect movement into discrete moments, proving that even simple acts reveal rhythmic, almost balletic patterns. Printed via collo...
About the Artist
Eadweard Muybridge · 1830–1904
Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) was an English-American photographer who revolutionized the understanding of motion through his pioneering chronophotographic studies. Born Edward James Muggeridge in Kingston upon Thames, England, he emigrated to America and became famous first for his dramatic landscape photographs of Yosemite Valley, then for his groundbreaking motion studies that proved horses li...