Woman Throwing Handkerchief in Air, Picking It Up, from the book Animal Locomotion
ca. 1887
Medium
Photography-Photoprint
Classification
Photography-Photoprint
Department
Smithsonian Collection
Museum
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Credit
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Paul and Laurette Laessle
Accession Number
1981.82.16
Tags
Art Historical Context
Behold *Woman Throwing Handkerchief in, Picking It Up*, a captivating photograph from Eadweard Muybridge groundbreaking 1887 publication *Animal Locomotion*. Muybridge, a pioneering photographer in the late 19th century, visual arts by capturing motion in unprecedented detail. Commissioned initially to settle a bet about whether all four hooves of a horse leave the ground during a gallop, his work expanded into exhaustive studies of human and animal movement, producing over 780 plates like this one. This sequential photoprint depicts a woman in mid-action—tossing a handkerchief skyward and gr...
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...