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In the 1880s, Muybridge produced over 100,000 images of animals and humans in motion, capturing what the human eye could not distinguish as separate movements. He also edited and published compilations of his work, which greatly influenced visual artists and the developing fields of scientific and industrial photography.

In 1872, the former governor of California Leland Stanford, a businessman and race-horse owner, hired Muybridge for some photographic studies. He had taken a position on a popularly debated question of the day — whether all four feet of a horse were off the ground at the same time while trotting. The same question had arisen about the actions of horses during a gallop. The human eye could not break down the action at the quick gaits of the trot and gallop.

Eadweard Muybridge was an English photographer important for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion and in motion-picture projection. Muybridge is known for his pioneering work on “Animal locomotion” in 1877 and 1878, which used multiple cameras to capture motion in stop-action photographs, and his “Zoopraxiscope”, a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the flexible perforated film strip used in cinematography.

Up until this time, most artists painted horses at a trot with one foot always on the ground; and at a full gallop with the front legs extended forward and the hind legs extended to the rear, and all feet off the ground. Stanford sided with the opinion of "unsupported transit" in the trot and gallop, and decided to have it proven scientifically. Stanford sought out Muybridge and hired him to settle the question. Muybridge settled Stanford's question with a single photographic negative showing his trotting horse “Occident” airborne at the trot. He later did additional studies, as well as improving his camera for quicker shutter speed and faster film emulsions.

Eadweard Muybridge & Francis Bacon

Stanford also wanted a study of the horse at a gallop. Muybridge planned to take a series of photos on 15 June 1878 at Stanford's Palo Alto Stock Farm. He placed numerous large glass-plate cameras in a line along the edge of the track; the shutter of each was triggered by a thread as the horse passed (in later studies he used a clockwork device to set off the shutters and capture the images). He copied the images in the form of silhouettes onto a disc to be viewed in a machine he had invented, which he called a Zoopraxiscope. This device was later regarded as an early movie projector, and the process as an intermediate stage toward motion pictures or cinematography.

Bacon also used the illusion of motion in his triptychs where his subjects appeared as distorted organic sculptural forms, as if they were rapidly moving.

In other paintings, Bacon again gave the audience the sense of movement by using a piece of fabric to smear paint in a direction, as if the animal was moving quickly.

Since Bacon grew up at a time where moving images were becoming a popular form of entertainment in western culture, he and many other artists were greatly inspired by this new way of seeing the world. It’s no wonder that his art made so many connections to that part of his world.

Today, similar setups of carefully timed multiple cameras are used in modern special effects photography but they have the opposite goal of capturing changing camera angles, with little or no movement of the subject. This is often dubbed "bullet time" photography.

Francis Bacon was influenced by the stop motion photos of Muybridge. Bacon’s studio was littered with images from Muybridge’s “Animal Locomotion” series, from which he drew inspiration for his portraits. Bacon often fidgeted when sitting for long periods of time and his self-portraits captured this constant movement, hence why he was so drawn to Muybridge’s photography.

In addition, he drew on the Cubist methods of representing multiple viewpoints in a single image. The results were portraits that appeared distorted, while retaining some recognisable features of the sitter. The colours often represented personality traits and his use of sweeping brushstrokes often give the viewer a sense of motion.

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