Photograph · Eadweard Muybridge · 19 June 1878
Eadweard Muybridge, The Horse in Motion (1878)
The Horse in Motion is Eadweard Muybridge's sequence of photographs of the mare Sallie Gardner galloping at Leland Stanford's Palo Alto stock farm on 19 June 1878, printed as a cabinet card. It settled the old question of whether a galloping horse ever has all four feet off the ground (it does), and as an 1878 publication it is in the public domain.
History
Stanford, the railroad magnate and former governor of California, hired Muybridge to find out how a horse's legs actually move at speed, something too fast for the eye. After early experiments in 1872–73, Muybridge set up a battery of cameras along a track with trip wires that the horse itself triggered, exposing each plate in a fraction of a second against a white wall marked with numbered lines.
The resulting sequences, published as cabinet cards in 1878 and 1879 and projected in his zoopraxiscope, are the beginning of motion photography and a direct ancestor of cinema. Muybridge went on to photograph hundreds of animal and human movements at the University of Pennsylvania, published as Animal Locomotion in 1887. Copies of the Sallie Gardner card are held by the Library of Congress.
What the print shows
Twelve numbered frames in three rows of a horse and rider galloping left to right past a grid of vertical lines, each frame a silhouette taken a fraction of a second after the last. Beneath them the printed title 'The Horse in Motion', Muybridge's credit, a note that the mare Sallie Gardner was running at a 1 : 40 gait over the Palo Alto track on 19 June 1878, and a description of the exposure times. The card has the warm sepia tone of the original.
Source and licence
Source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
Licence: Public domain. The card was published in 1878 and Muybridge died in 1904; no rights remain in the image or its scan.
Reproduced from a high-resolution public-domain scan of the printed card, including its caption text.
Available sizes and prices
Print: paper or framed Etsy listing 4548815415
| Size | Paper | Framed |
|---|---|---|
| 8 × 12 in (21 × 30 cm) | $29.99 | $98.99 |
Printed to order, shipped in 2–5 business days, free US shipping. Paper: matte fine-art paper. Framed: real wood (black, white, wood, dark wood), shatterproof acrylic, ready to hang.
Buy
- Eadweard Muybridge The Horse in Motion (print: paper or framed): buy on Etsy, from $29.99.
Frequently asked questions
- What did Muybridge's horse photographs prove?
- That a galloping horse lifts all four hooves off the ground at one point in its stride, with the legs gathered under the body rather than stretched out as painters had shown.
- Which horse is in The Horse in Motion?
- Sallie Gardner, a mare owned by Leland Stanford, photographed at his Palo Alto farm on 19 June 1878 with her jockey up.
- How were the photographs taken?
- With a row of cameras along the track whose shutters were tripped by threads the horse broke as it passed, each exposure lasting a small fraction of a second.
- What sizes does the print come in?
- An A4-size poster (8.3 by 11.7 inches, listed as 8 by 12) unframed or in a real-wood frame. The sizes and prices are listed on this page.
Sources
Published 20 Oct 2026; prices are the live Etsy prices as of 20 Oct 2026. The work is public domain; this page's text is © ThinkDotCo and may be quoted with a link.