Happy Birthday Eadweard Muybridge!


Valley of the Yosemite from Union Point Photographic innovator Eadweard Muybridge was born on this day in 1830.

Born Edward Muggeridge in England, Muybridge came to the United States in 1850 as a publishing representative. By 1856 he had opened a bookstore in San Francisco. After an extended trip to England, he returned to California in 1867 as an accomplished photographer. That same year he made his first trip to the Yosemite Valley.

In direct competition with Carleton Watkins's acclaimed Yosemite views of 1861–62, Muybridge's fifty-one mammoth plates, made in 1872, shortly before he returned to England, confirmed his reputation as a preeminent landscape photographer. They were offered for sale by the San Francisco gallery of Bradley and Rulofson the following year. Perhaps to distinguish his work from that of other photographers of Yosemite, such as Watkins and Charles Leander Weed, Muybridge chose points of view that heighten dramatic intensity. His photographs are notable for the remarkable difficulty of the camera's placement. "He has gone to points where his packers refused to follow him," wrote one observer.

Muybridge's views of Yosemite attracted the attention of Leland Stanford, former governor of California and president of the Central Pacific Railroad, who in 1872 commissioned him to photograph Stanford's horse Occident at a gallop in order to determine if a running horse's feet are ever off the ground simultaneously. These studies led to the extensive stop-action photographs of humans and animals in motion, for which Muybridge is now most famous.


Woman Descending a Stairway and Turning Around,</i> from the book, <i>Animal Locomotion Source: Merry A. Foresta. American Photographs: The First Century (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art with the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996).

Pictured top: Eadweard Muybridge, (1830 England–1904 England), Valley of the Yosemite from Union Point,1872, albumen print on paper mounted on paperboard, 17 x 21 1/2 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Charles T. Isaac.

Pictured bottom: Eadweard Muybridge, (1830 England–1904 England), Woman Descending a Stairway and Turning Around, from the book, Animal Locomotion,about 1887, collotype on paper, sheet: 7 15/16 x 15 3/16 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Paul and Laurette Laessle.