Reframed: Eadweard Muybridge's "Galloping Horse”

What Muybridge captured in glass plates, then transferred to photographs, transformed the studies of both science and art, as well as photography itself. Art historians, much to their dismay, discovered that artists, including the revered horse portraitist and French master Eugene Delacroix, had been portraying horses incorrectly for centuries.

Artists had known that all four hooves of a horse come off the ground during a gallop, but Muybridge proved that the horse collects his hooves under his stomach, rather than extending them in front and behind him as Delacroix had insisted.

Originally, Muybridge was financed by Leland Stanford, the California Governor for whom Stanford University was named. After the two men had a falling out, the University of Pennsylvania financed Muybridge’s studies.

Several of those “first experiments on motion and photography are lost to time,” notes Rijksmuseum curator Mattie Boom, yet “Bouquet” was impeccably preserved. “At that point, photography wasn’t an art yet,” Boom adds, yet Muybridge’s work was instrumental in gaining respect for the medium within the art world.

As photographers soon descend upon Tokyo for the 2021 Olympics, the world once again will be contemplating the blurred boundary between art and athleticism.