Rebecca Solnit: River of Shadows

It is hard to recover the resonance such information had, because what is known is quickly taken for granted, because horses are now so remote from everyday life for most people, and because accuracy is no longer so important a goal for painting. Indeed, at the time there was a conflict in French painting between the scrupulous realism of the established painters and the experiments of the Impressionists, who were pursuing a different kind of realism, the realism of what things look like rather than what they are. The sculptor Auguste Rodin took the side of appearances, declaring, “It is the artist who tells the truth and photography that lies. For in reality time does not stand still.” Muybridge created a crisis of representation for realist painters. They had always insisted that they represented their subjects with maximum accuracy, but that accuracy had always been based on the observations of the eye. Truth and appearance had been reconcilable, and like the artists in Yosemite, the artists painting horses could consider art and science as aligned in their investigation of nature. The American painter Thomas Eakins, for example, incorporated the study of anatomy, dissection, and the nude into his curriculum at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and was captivated by the early motion studies (he sometimes relied on photographs for his own paintings and eventually made his own motion studies). Upon first seeing the motion studies, he immediately wrote Muybridge, incorporated them into his classes, and began a picture of four carriage horses whose positions were based on information gleaned from Muybridge. The painting was later criticized because the horses' legs were portrayed as sharply as they would appear in a high-speed photograph but the spokes of the wheels blurred as they would to the eye or a slow exposure. Even Eakins was confused by the new information. Only artists such as Claude Monet, whose images of the same subject transformed by time of day or season were akin to the motion studies, were at ease with Muybridge's revelations. Edgar Degas made a number of drawings based on the equestrian photographs.

What a high-speed photograph showed and what the eye saw were in conflict, but the evidence of the camera was incontrovertible to those who had dedicated themselves to realism. The eminent academic painter Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier suffered most. Stanford visited him in Paris in 1879 and used the motion-study photographs to dazzle and eventually depress the painter, who specialized in battlefields, historical subjects and genre scenes and particularly prided himself on his representation of horses. Meissonier at first thought that the pictures had been edited, eliminating one position of the gallop, the position he had often painted. When he realized the sequences were complete, he declared, “All these years my eyes had deceived me.” Stanford reportedly replied, “The machine cannot lie,” and gave him a tutorial on horses' gaits, which ended with the painter exclaiming in despair, “After thirty years of absorbing and concentrated study, I find I have been wrong. Never again shall I touch a brush!” He had gone to enormous lengths to draw horses accurately, even building a miniature railway track on his estate so that he could travel alongside a horse in motion to observe it closely (pushed on a sofa with wheels, according to one source). Each of the horses in his paintings had derived from extensive studies and sketches from life, or from life as it appeared to the human eye. The photographs precipitated a crisis. “His commitment to the veracity of his representations forced him to ignore what he could see in favor of what he could not,” writes the art historian Marc Gotlieb, “but Meissonier remained faithful to a standard of truth unavailable to human perception, a standard that nullified his project. From this perspective, Meissonier's choice could be said to have brought the tradition of French Salon painting to its terminus.” Meissonier repainted the legs of a horse in one of his most famous paintings to accord with the facts supplied by Muybridge, but the entire mission of painting had changed. He wryly acknowledged this when he painted Stanford sitting in front of a table laden with books. One of the books is open, revealing a few panels of a Muybridge motion study. The photographs lie in the painting like a virus in the body, a virus that would change the nature of the visible.