Plate Number 40. Walking and throwing a handkerchief over shoulders
Medium
collotype
Dimensions
image: 22.3 × 29.4 cm (8 3/4 × 11 9/16 in.) sheet: 47.9 × 60.4 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
2014.79.92
Art Historical Context
Eadweard Muybridge *Plate Number 40. and throwing a handkerchief over* (1887) is a captivating entry from his seminal *Animal Locomotion* series, a landmark in photographic history. A British-born innovator who settled in America, Muybridge pioneered high-speed photography in the 1870s, famously proving that horses gallop with all four hooves off the ground. By 1887, he expanded his experiments to humans, using a battery of up to 24 cameras triggered by tripping wires to capture split-second motion sequences across 781 collotype plates. This plate freezes a dynamic moment: a figure mid-stride...
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...