Plate Number 400. Emptying a bucket of water
Medium
collotype
Dimensions
image: 25.2 × 28.8 cm (9 15/16 × 11 5/16 in.) sheet: 47.7 × 60.2 cm (18 3/4 × 23 11/16 in.)
Classification
Photograph
Department
CPH
Museum
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Credit
Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase, 1887)
Accession Number
2015.19.4117
Art Historical Context
Eadweard Muybridge’s 1887 collotype “Plate Number 400. Emptying a bucket of water” belongs to his landmark “Animal Locomotion” series, in which the photographer used banks of cameras to freeze successive instants of human movement. Working at the University of Pennsylvania, Muybridge recorded ordinary actions—walking, climbing, pouring—so that scientists and artists could study the body’s mechanics for the first time. The resulting grids of images revealed phases of motion invisible to the naked eye and helped lay the groundwork for modern cinema. Printed by the collotype process, each plate ...
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...