Plate Number 54. Two women walking arm in arm and turning around; one flirting a fan
Medium
collotype
Dimensions
image: 18.3 × 40.15 cm (7 3/16 × 15 13/16 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
2014.79.106
Rights
Public Domain
Art Historical Context
Eadweard Muybridge's *Plate Number 54: Two Women Walking Arm in Arm and Turning Around; One Flirting a Fan* (1887) captures a fleeting moment of Victorian-era grace and playfulness. Part of his groundbreaking *Animal Locomotion* series, this collotype print freezes two elegantly dressed women mid-stride—one glancing back coyly while fluttering a fan—across a sequence of 12 frames on a vast 47.9 × 60.4 cm sheet. Muybridge, a pioneering photographer, used multiple cameras triggered in rapid succession to dissect human movement, transforming static images into dynamic narratives. This plate exem...
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...