Los 4058

Muybridge, Eadweard
(1830-1904)Animal Locomotion. An Electrophotographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements

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Fotografie des 19. – 21. Jahrhunderts (Katalog nur online verfügbar)
Auktionsdatum 4.12.2024

Animal Locomotion. An Electrophotographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements. 1872-1885. Bound volume with a total of 21 collotypes on plates. Each circa 46 x 60 cm. Each with printed caption, number and Muybridge's copyright on plate. Title page with dedication by Muybridge to "Sir Fredk Leighton Baron P.R.A. with the homage of the author June 1889" and later dedication by Lord Leighton "To Linley Sambourne from an old friend. July 22, 1896" in pencil. Bound in half morocco, cloth-covered album (corners rubbed, some scratches) gilt morocco cover label "Animal Locomotion. By Eadweard Muybridge. 1872-1885. Plates. University of Pennsylvania". University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1887.

Grolier, Truthful Lens, 123. Parr/Badger, The Photobook I, 52. This album features an important collection of Eadweard Muybridge’s groundbreaking “instantaneous photography,” a self-developed technique that enabled high-precision stop-motion images using an early rapid-acting shutter. Initially focusing on horses, Muybridge expanded his repertoire to include athletes, birds, lions, and camels, famously capturing the first image of a galloping horse with all four hooves off the ground in 1872. By 1885, he had amassed over 20,000 photographic negatives, comprising 781 sequential photo plates taken from multiple cameras positioned at carefully planned locations and angles, each illustrating a subject in continuous motion.
Muybridge’s handwritten dedication on the title page to Frederic Leighton, one of Victorian England’s celebrated artists, underscores the influence of his movement studies on contemporary artists such as Thomas Eakins, Frederic Remington, Ernest Meissonier, Edgar Degas, and the French inventor Étienne-Jules Marey. Notably, Leighton passed away in 1896, the same year he gifted this particular copy to his “old friend,” the renowned Punch cartoonist Edward Linley Sambourne.
The complete eleven-part work Animal Locomotion contains 781 numbered plates. The accompanying Author’s Edition, offered here, featured a removable subscription leaf that allowed subscribers to choose their preferred plates, resulting in varied content across different sets. This copy includes plates 3, 133, 152, 174, 187, 214, 279, 289, 347, 408, 465, 471, 565, 616, 626, 647, 659, 710, 721, 739, and 755. The exceptionally fine collotypes were printed by the Photo-Gravure Company in New York.
– Edges of plates time-stained and with some moisture staining, images not affected, images very finely printed and in very good condition.