[Study of Muscular Action: Young Man Leaning on a Horse's Leg]

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[Study of Muscular Action: Young Man Leaning on a Horse's Leg]

Creator

Thomas Eakins

American Photographer · 1844–1916

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Artist

Thomas Eakins spent virtually his entire life in and around Philadelphia, except for a three-and-a-half-year period between 1866 and 1870 when he was an art student in Paris. Primarily a painter and sculptor, Eakins did not make photographs for exhibition. He made private portraits of family and friends, scientific documents, and used his photographs as teaching tools for his art classes and his w

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Date
1885
Medium
Lantern slide
Culture
American
Department
Photographs
Institution
Getty Museum

Thomas Eakins' investigations into motion grew out of Eadweard Muybridge's animal locomotion project at the University of Pennsylvania. Eakins assisted Muybridge in finding models for his motion studies, and, erecting a separate shed on the campus, Eakins began to conduct his own experiments. This photograph is one of a series of what Eakins called "differential-action" studies, which culminated nine years later in a lecture entitled "The Differential Action of Certain Muscles Passing More than One Joint." This lantern slide image was probably used as a projected illustration during the talk. In order to demonstrate the tensile strengths of a horse's muscles, the man on the ladder balances his weight on the horse's skinned hind leg.

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