Plate Number 347. Wrestling, Graeco-Roman
Medium
collotype
Dimensions
image: 34.1 × 43.7 cm (13 7/16 × 17 3/16 in.) sheet: 47.9 × 60.3 cm (18 7/8 × 23 3/4 in.)
Classification
Photograph
Department
CPH
Museum
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Credit
Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase, 1887)
Accession Number
2014.79.371
Art Historical Context
Eadweard Muybridge’s *Plate Number 347. Wrestling, Graeco-Roman* (1887) belongs to his groundbreaking *Animal Locomotion* series, a monumental project that used sequential photography to analyze human and animal movement. Working at the University of Pennsylvania, Muybridge arranged banks of cameras to capture split-second phases of action, revealing details invisible to the naked eye. This particular plate freezes two athletes locked in a Graeco-Roman wrestling hold, their straining bodies recorded across successive frames on a single collotype sheet. The collotype process, prized for its ri...
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...