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Animals in Motion
Animals in Motion
Animals in Motion
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Animals in Motion

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"The dry plate's most spectacular early use was by Eadweard Muybridge." — Life
"A really marvelous series of plates." — Nature (London)
"These photographs have resolved many complicated questions." — Art Journal
Here is the largest, most comprehensive selection of Muybridge's famous animal photos — more than 4,000 high-speed shots of 34 different animals and birds, in 123 different types of actions. Animals are shown walking, running, leaping, flying — in typical actions. The horse alone is shown in more than 40 different ways: galloping with nude rider, trotting, pacing with sulky, cantering, jumping hurdles, carrying, rolling on barrels, and 36 other actions. All photos taken against ruled backgrounds; most actions taken from 3 angles at once: 90 degrees, 60 degrees, rear. Foreshortened views are included.
These are true action photos, stopped in series, taken at speeds up to 1/2000th of a second. Actions are illustrated in series, with as many as 50 shots per action. Muybridge worked with the University of Pennsylvania for three years, made more than 100,000 exposures, and spent more than $50,000. His work has never been superseded as a lifetime reference for animators, illustrators, artists, and art directors.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 24, 2012
ISBN9780486129990
Animals in Motion

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
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    Muybridge's work has been called "one of the great monuments of 19th century photography" and almost everybody has seen bits of it even if they're not aware of the author. The sequential photos in these two volumes illustrate dozens of types of actions from different angles, making them, still today, an industry reference for artists, animators, art directors, etc.The Human Figure presents subjects in the nude, so that muscles are visible. They are male, female, elderly, babies, performing 163 types of action shot from front, rear and three-quarter. Cycles (walk, run...) are presented in full. Animals in Motion particularly focuses on the horse (and doesn't just show but also explains the different gaits) but also has plates for 32 other creatures, among which dogs, the elephant, small and big cats, the sloth, kangaroo, eagle and ostrich!When I worked in an animation department, both books were prominent on our reference bookshelf, and I later purchased Animals in Motion for myself: as an illustrator it is still priceless to me. Human references are easy to find online if necessary (as long as I don't need a motion sequence), but it is harder to find exactly the position you need for an animal, so the book spares me much fruitless searching. The lighting in the pictures also really helps me with shading when I'm not bound to a different source of light.A drawback of both books is that the photography being so old is not always very clear: it can be hard to make out the muscle lines or, at odd angles, the exact contours. There are also no plunging or upwards shots: all photos have a level perspective. This means a certain proficiency with drawing bodies in space is useful to fill these gaps, and beginners may find it frustrating at times. Just remember this is not a book to teach you to draw, but a reference book. Horse artists in particular will find it indispensable.

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Animals in Motion - Eadweard Muybridge

Copyright © 1957 by Dover Publications, Inc. All rights reserved.

DOVER Pictorial Archive SERIES

This book belongs to the Dover Pictorial Archive Series. You may use the designs and illustrations for graphics and crafts applications, free and without special permission, provided that you include no more than ten in the same publication or project. (For permission for additional use, please write to Dover Publications, Inc., 31 East 2nd Street, Mineola, N.Y. 11501.)

However, republication or reproduction of any illustration by any other graphic service, whether it be in a book or in any other design resource, is strictly prohibited.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 57-4552

International Standard Book Number

9780486129990

Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation

20203830

www.doverpublications.com

about this edition

This new Dover edition of Animals in Motion contains a selection of plates from the eleven-volume work, Animal Locomotion, first published in 1887. Almost all of the illustrations are reproduced the same size as in the original work. The selection of plates was made by Lewis S. Brown of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He also wrote the account of Eadweard Muybridge and His Work and the Description of the Animals.

Together with the new Dover edition of The Human Figure in Motion, the present work accounts for nearly 400 of the 781 plates published by Muybridge.

Most of the selected photographs are clear; some, however, are deficient in lighting but have been included in this edition because of the compelling interest of their subjects. The reader is asked to make due allowance for the technical difficulty of reproducing old, often faded, photographs. To avoid falsifying the work of Muybridge, none has been retouched, but in a few cases light lines and dots have been added by Mr. Brown to discriminate between the feet of the horses.

The publisher is grateful to Mr. E. Weyhe of Weyhe Galleries for permission to use illustrations from the original set owned by the Weyhe Bookshop. Without the use of this complete set, it is doubtful that a new edition could have been published.

The publisher is indebted to Mr. Beaumont Newhall and the George Eastman House for reviewing the entire manuscript of this edition and for information about the material available at the George Eastman House.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

about this edition

Table of Figures

EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE AND HIS WORK

PREFACE (to the original edition)

INTRODUCTION

ANALYSIS OF ANIMAL LOCOMOTION

PRELUDE TO ANALYSES

THE WALK

THE AMBLE

THE TROT

THE RACK (OR PACE)

THE CANTER

THE GALLOP

THE RICOCHET

THE LEAP

THE BUCK AND KICK

CHANGE OF GAIT

THE FLIGHT OF BIRDS

RECORDS OF MOVEMENTS FROM OBSERVATION

THE PLATES

APPENDIX

Table of Figures

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

Figure 4

Figure 5

Figure 6

Figure 7

Figure 8

Figure 9

Figure 10

Figure 11

Figure 12

Figure 13

Figure 14

Figure 15

Figure 16

Figure 17

Figure 18

Figure 19

Figure 20

Figure 21

EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE AND HIS WORK

All students of animal motion sooner or later find their way back to the monumental photographic work of Eadweard Muybridge. The man himself is rather a dim figure. In the first volume of the new Dover editions, Professor Robert Taft of the University of Kansas has given us the few facts known about Muybridge.

His last two books, Animals in Motion ( 1899 ) and The Human Figure in Motion (1901) are still the basic authorities on the movements and gaits natural to most animals, particularly to man and the horse. Despite the moving-picture and slow-motion cameras we now possess, little has been learned that Muybridge did not discover.

Both of the books mentioned are abridgements of a larger work entitled Animal Locomotion, published in 1887 under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania. It contained 781 plates, printed on heavy linen paper sheets 19 x 24 inches in size, each plate comprising from 10 to 48 separate pictures. The work was issued in several forms. All 781 plates could be purchased for $500, encased in leather portfolios, or for an additional $50 bound into 11 volumes. For $100 a purchaser could obtain a selection of 100 plates, unbound in a leather portfolio, plus such additional plates as he wished at $1 each.

The cost of the complete set limited its sale to a relatively few institutions and wealthy persons. The card in the New York Public Library file states that only 37 of these sets are still extant. Few of these are still complete. Professor Taft has recorded the results of his survey in 1953. I can add some items of information. In New York City, there are sets almost-complete at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Public Library, and the main library of the American Museum of Natural History. The Osborn Library of Paleontology has 40 loose plates. Cooper Union appears to have once possessed a complete set, but now has only 166 loose plates. The Art Students League has 35; the Museum of Modern Art has something less than 100, as does the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. I myself own one of the limited editions containing 105 plates.

The George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y. owns 430 of the negatives used in making collotype plates for Animal Locomotion, 645 of the published plates, one of the cameras, a plate-holder for the 12-lens camera, and original glass Zoöpraxiscopic disk, an album of albumen prints made by Muybridge himself from his negatives, and four notebooks kept by Muybridge in 1885. These notebooks contain data useful to the research student: the exact date of each exposure; full name of the subject; elapsed time from taking negative 1 to 12. The material was given to the George Eastman House by Dr. George E. Nitzsche and the Kingston-on-Thames Public Library.

Animals in Motion and The Human Figure in Motion each contained a selection of about 100 plates from the set of 781, reduced in reproduction to go on one page 9½ x 12 inches in size. Both of these smaller books are also extremely rare. Copies of both are to be found at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but the American Museum of Natural History lacks one of them and the New York Public Library lacks the other. The editor owns a very battered copy of Animals in Motion, 5th printing. There are 1st and 4th editions of The Human Figure in Motion in the Avery Collection of rare books at Columbia University.

Nearly three-quarters of the plates in the original Animal Locomotion dealt with the human figure, but there were 219 on the motion of birds and beasts–95 on horses, 40 on mules, asses, oxen and other domestic animals, 57 on wild animals (in which category Muybridge put camels and elephants), and 27 on birds.

Nearly all of these 219 plates are reproduced in the present volume, in their original size or only slightly reduced. The greatest deletion has been in the section on birds. Since Muybridge could not control his subjects here, many of the photographs were disappointing.

No titles or explanatory text are to be found on any of the plates in Animal Locomotion. The purchaser was evidently expected to refer to a subsidiary booklet published by Muybridge, a Prospectus and Catalogue of Plates. This work is even rarer than the sets it must have accompanied. The only three copies I could locate are at the American Museum of Natural History, an incomplete one at the New York Public Library, and one copy, condition not checked, in the Medical Library at Columbia University, where, strangely enough, there seem to be none of the plates.

Muybridge gave the best account of his work and best explanation of the gaits in Animals in Motion. All of the text that pertains to the plates is retained in the present volume. Included also is data to be found only in the Prospectus–identification of most of the animal models, and many of the time-intervals between phases. The latter are important because multiplication of the time-interval by the number of phases in a stride will give the approximate time of the stride.

Some details given in the Prospectus differ from what is to be found in the notebooks owned by the George Eastman House. For instance, the horse named as Clinton in Plate 31 appears in the notebook as Mr. Clinton’s horse Billy. The editor has followed the Prospectus in such details.

The wild animals and birds came from the Philadelphia Zoo. Most of the horse models apparently came from the Gentlemen’s Driving Park in Philadelphia. Muybridge states that Daisy was a good hunting horse and Pandora a jumper of more than ordinary ability. He gives the breed designations of five of his horse subjects. Dusel, Billy, and Hansel are Belgian draught horses, Annie G. and Bouquet are Thorough-breds. The editor is indebted to Mrs. Herbert Cutler of Kingston, New York, well-known horsewoman and judge, for her assistance in describing the other horse models. It must be understood that some of the preferred breed types have changed a little during the seventy-odd years that have elapsed since Muybridge photographed these horses.

There is one aspect of animal motion that Muybridge does not stress, but which is nonetheless important to an understanding of the plates depicting the Canter, the Gallop, and the Leap. This is

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