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static pose standing on a rug (Unknown photographer,
Museum of Modern Art) into a walking fi gure in a
landscape.
The American realist painter Thomas Eakins took
photographs of nude models for his paintings, and
provided his students with nude studies of himself and
others. The nude fi gures in his paintings Arcadia, 1883
(Metropolitan Museum of Art) and Swimming, 1885,
(Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas) were cre-
ated by copying fi gures from photographs. Sometimes
Eakin’s combined individual nude studies such as his
photograph of Susan Macdowell Eakins, c. 1883 (Penn-
sylvania Academy of Fine Arts) into larger fi gure groups
within a landscape setting.
Motion in Photographs andPaintings
Impressionist artists copied the blurred images caused
by the movement of fi gures and slow exposure times
in order to express motion in their paintings. This can
be seen in Robinson’s painting Gathering Plums, 1891
(Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, Eva
Underhill Holbrook Memorial Collection of American
Art) where the artist faithfully copied the blur caused
by the movement of the plum pickers hands.
Exposure times of 1/50th of a second were possible
as early as the late 1850s. The reduced exposure time
allowed for instantaneous photographs of city life. By
1861 the London Stereoscopic Company was boasting
that their photographs showed horses legs and walking
fi gures “without a blur.” Stereoscopic photographs often
showed these snapshots of city life with walking fi gures
in poses not traditionally found in art.
Edward Muybridge’s instantaneous photographs in-
fl uenced a number of painters in the 1880s. Muybridge’s
1872 commission to photograph race horses in motion
resulted in photographs that contradicted what had been
depicted in paintings, and lead to his open criticism
on the way that Realist artists such as Rosa Bonheur
(1822–1899) painted horses. The actual motion of a
running horse’s legs was recorded by Muybridge plac-
ing a bank of cameras along the race track and taking
a series of stop action photographs. The photographs
revealed that all four hoofs actually left the ground,
but not in a way actually depicted by painters. By the
1880s Muybridge was lecturing and using lantern slides
to compare his photographs of horses in motion to fa-
mous paintings he felt did not accurately represent the
horse’s movement.
Edward Degas (1834–1917) and Thomas Eakins
(1844–1916) responded in different ways to this new
visual information. Eakins took a scientifi c interest in
animal locomotion and his painting May Morning in
the Park shows horses trotting in front of a carriage in
a manner demonstrating the infl uence of Muybridge’s
photographs The Horse in Motion Abe Edgington
trotting (photographic print on card, The Library of
Congress) and Lizzie M trotting, harnessed to sulky,
Animal Locomotion pl 609. (1884–86). Muybridge’s
book Animal Locomotion included human motion
which also intrigued Eakins. The American Realist
artist was particularly interested in how muscles in the
human body worked and used sequential photographs
of fi gures walking to gain insight into how to paint a
fi gure in motion.
Both Degas and Eakins, not only studied Muybridge’s
photographs, but also took their own photographs of
fi gures in motion. Degas was particularly interested in
painting ballet dancers and photographed them to better
understand how they moved. Paintings such as Carriage
at the Races, c. 1873 (Boston Museum of Fine Arts),
and Eakin’s May Morning in the Park, convey motion
through the accurate rendering of the horses’ legs and
also by positioning the subjects at the edge of the canvas
to show that they are traveling across a landscape that
continues beyond the picture’s edge.More to Discover about Individual Artists and
Their Use of Photographs
Painters found many ways to use photographs in com-
bination with preliminary sketches or to replace pencil
studies for paintings. Both Impressionist and Realist
artists drew penciled grids on their canvas to aid copy-
ing photograph images onto canvas. The French artist
Jules-Meuenier projected glass lantern slides on to
his preliminary drawings which he then transferred to
canvas. Eakin’s also traced projected images onto his
canvas. Other artists, including Eakins, used a panto-
graph that allowed lines traced on the photograph to be
transferred in a different scale onto canvas.
While most painters in the second half of the nine-
teenth century found some use for photographs as an aid
in creating their work, they did not always openly admit
to their reliance on photographs to their public and art
critics. During the 1880s, artists including Eakins and
the French Realist Pascal Aldolphe-Jean Dagan-Bouv-
eret (Photograph of the artist working at Ormoy from a
model on The Pardon in Brittany, 1886, Metropolitan
Museum of Art, Archives dela Haute-Salone, Vesoul,
France) went so far as to pose for photographs depict-
ing them painting from a live model, when they in fact
had relied heavily on photographic studies to create
the painting. Conservators and art historians looking
closely at nineteenth century paintings, artists’ letters
and journals will continue to uncover information about
how photographs were used by individual artists.
Diane E. Forsberg