How can movement be conveyed by a still image? How is motion evoked differently in photography and painting? These questions are addressed by showing photographs from Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion series (1887) alongside artworks from Royal Pavilion & Museums Fine Art collection in The Moving Image.
About the artist
Eadweard Muybridge was a 19th century English photographer based in the United States. For one of his assignments he investigated and documented how horses ran. He set up a line of cameras that took a photo as the horse passed. From these photos Muybridge was able to reveal, for the first time, that all four of the horse’s hooves left the ground at the same time. Muybridge’s discoveries influenced the representation of movement in fine art and led to the development of moving film.
About the exhibition
Find out about paintings on display in the exhibition
The Moving Image was a temporary exhibition at Hove Museum & Art Gallery (9 March 2010 – September 2010).
Drawings from St Andrews Primary School
What happened next?
Working collaboratively, students from Reception Class and Year Six at St Andrews Primary School have produced artworks that aim to represent movement within a still image.
These drawings are in an imaginative conversation with the paintings on display in The Moving Image, as they visually suggest ‘what happened next’:
Figures in Motion
Here, each picture is based on the imprint of a cut-out figure placed temporarily on the canvases. When all the students’ paintings are viewed alongside each other, it appears as if the figure is in motion – dancing, skipping, and waving. The paintings begin to tell a story just like Eadweard Muybridge’s famous locomotion studies.
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