Plate Number 40. Walking and throwing a handkerchief over shoulders

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, gracefully tossing a handkerchief over their shoulders. Printed via collotype—a precise, photomechanical process that faithfully reproduced fine details on a large 47.9 × 60.4 cm sheet—this image exemplifies Muybridge's scientific rigor and artistic vision. The sequential format across plates revealed the fluidity of everyday actions previously invisible to the naked eye. Housed in the National Gallery of Art's Corcoran Collection, this work not only advanced biomechanics and anatomy studies but also laid groundwork for motion pictures, influencing filmmakers like the Lumière brothers. It's a testament to how photography bridged art and science, inviting us to marvel at the poetry in motion.

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...