THE HUMAN FIGURE IN MOTION is a pictorial book showcasing the first experiments performed by Eadweard Muybridge in understanding motion and its characteristics with the camera. The Following are only abstracts from the Introductory chapter of the book.

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In the “ Transactions of the Royal Institution of Great Britain” of Date March 13, 1882, is printed an epitome of a lecture, given by the author of the present work, on the Science of Animal Locomotion in its relation to Design in Art, which is thus alluded to in an article by the late George A. Sala, published in the Illustrated London News, on the 18th of the same month...

“ On the Monday last, in the theatre of the Royal Institution, a select and representative audience assembled to witness a series of most interesting demonstrations of animal locomotion, given by Mr. Muybridge... who exhibited a large number of photographs {illustrating consecutive phases in the motion} of the horse, walking, ambling. galloping, and leaping--- By the aid of an astonishing apparatus called a zoopraxiscope... the animals suddenly became mobile and beautiful, and walked, cantered, ambled, galloped, and leaped over hurdles in the field of vision in a perfectly natural and life-like manner...

The transparent photographs used during these lectures were some of the results of an investigation commenced by the author at Sacramento, California in may, 1872, and continued, with numerous periods of intermission, at Palo Alto, in the same State, until 1879...

The Zoopraxiscope was devised by the author, on the principle initiated in the early part of the nineteenth century by the Belgian physicist Plateau - for the purpose of demonstrating the persistency of vision - and is briefly described in an essay b yuthe Late AProfessor Richard A. Proctor... 

“ A few years ago the news of the successful photographing of a galloping horse was received with incredulity... That a horse rushing along at the rate of a mile in one and two-thirds of a minute [more than seventeen yards in a second], and moving its limbs forward in part of each stride with nearly twice that velocity, should be seized by photographic art so as to show every limb well and clearly delineated, would have seemed wonderful indeed to the early professors of that art. Still more amazing is it to find ten or twelve distinct pictures taken during a single stride, the comparison of which, inter se, enable the most rapid of all equine movements to be analysed as though the horse could be made to go through all the motions of the swiftest gallop at a funeral pace. "...

THIS BOOK CONTENTS

The 4,789 photographs in this definitive selection show the human figure—models almost all undraped—engaged in over 160 different types of action: running, climbing stairs, tumbling, dressing, undressing, hopping on one foot, dancing, etc. Children walking, crawling and many dozens of other activities.

" A book every artist must posess in his library"

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