Eadweard Muybridge: The Murderer Who Froze Time
Few careers in the history of art contain a sentence like this one: between photographing Yosemite and inventing the moving image, he shot his wife's lover dead and was acquitted. Eadweard Muybridge, born plain Edward Muggeridge above a grocer's shop in Kingston upon Thames in 1830, remains one of photography's strangest and most consequential figures. His galloping horses settled a bet, scandalised painters and set cinema in motion.
A new name and a changed brain
Muggeridge emigrated to America in his twenties, sold books in San Francisco, and in 1860 suffered a violent stagecoach crash in Texas that left him unconscious for days with a serious head injury. Friends said he came back a different man: erratic, obsessive, brilliant. He also came back with a new vocation. By the late 1860s, under the alias 'Helios', he was hauling a mammoth-plate camera into Yosemite and producing landscape photographs that made his name, along with a habit of reinventing his own: Muggeridge became Muygridge, then Muybridge, and finally he respelled Edward as Eadweard, after the Saxon kings.
The bet and the bullet
In 1872 the railroad magnate and former California governor Leland Stanford hired him to answer a question horsemen had argued over for decades: does a trotting horse ever have all four hooves off the ground at once? Painters had always shown galloping horses stretched out like rocking horses, front legs forward, back legs back. The human eye simply could not resolve the truth.
The work was interrupted in the most lurid way possible. In 1874 Muybridge discovered that his young wife's lover, a drifter named Major Harry Larkyns, was likely the father of her baby son. He tracked Larkyns to a ranch near Calistoga, greeted him with the words 'I have a message from my wife', and shot him dead. At trial in 1875 his lawyers pleaded insanity, citing the stagecoach injury. The jury rejected the insanity plea but acquitted him anyway, ruling the killing justifiable homicide. Muybridge went back to work.
Twelve cameras and a vanished doubt
At Stanford's Palo Alto stock farm in June 1878, Muybridge lined up a battery of cameras fitted with electric shutters he had devised, each triggered by a tripwire as the horse passed. The mare Sallie Gardner galloped down the track and into history. The plates showed, unambiguously, that all four hooves do leave the ground, but tucked under the body at mid-stride, not stretched out as painters had always imagined. Artists across Europe quietly repainted their horses. Some, like Degas, copied Muybridge's plates directly into their sketchbooks.
That same year he produced another marvel: a 360-degree panorama of San Francisco taken from Nob Hill, thirteen mammoth plates stitched into a seventeen-foot sweep of a city that would burn to the ground twenty-eight years later.
Pictures that move
To show his results, Muybridge invented the zoopraxiscope in 1879, a lantern that projected images painted from his sequences onto a spinning glass disc. Audiences saw a horse gallop across a screen: the first time in history that photographically derived moving images had been projected for the public. At the University of Pennsylvania in the 1880s he expanded the project into Animal Locomotion, 781 plates of horses, buffalo, elephants, wrestlers, dancers and fencers. In 1888 he met Thomas Edison and discussed combining his images with the phonograph. Within a few years, cinema existed. Muybridge retired to Kingston upon Thames, the town he had left half a century earlier, and died there in 1904, digging a scale model of the Great Lakes in his garden.
Bring Muybridge home
Art Poster Archive offers two Muybridge exhibition posters printed on museum-quality archival paper: the Eadweard Muybridge Exhibition Poster and the Muybridge Time-Lapse Exhibition Poster. Both are available in five sizes and pair beautifully with our other photography exhibition posters.