title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: His paternal great-grandparents were Robert Muggeridge and Hannah Charman, who owned a farm. Their oldest son John Muggeridge (1756–1819) was Edward's grandfather; he was a stationer who taught Edward the business. Several uncles and cousins, including Henry Muggeridge (Sheriff of London), were corn merchants in the City of London. All were born in Banstead, Surrey. Edward's younger brother George, born in 1833, lived with their uncle Samuel in 1851, after the death of their father in 1843.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: At the age of 20, Muybridge decided to seek his fortune. He turned down an offer of money from his grandmother, saying "No, thank you Grandma, I'm going to make a name for myself. If I fail, you will never hear of me again." Muybridge emigrated to the United States, arriving in New York City in 1850. Here, he was possibly a partner in the book business enterprise Muygridge & Bartlett together with a medical student, which existed for about a year. He spent his first years importing and selling books from the UK, and became familiar with early photography through his acquaintance with New York daguerreotypist Silas T. Selleck.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: Muybridge probably arrived in California around the autumn of 1855, when it had not yet been a state for more than five years. He visited the new state capital, Sacramento, as an agent selling illustrated Shakespeare books in April 1856, and soon after settled at 113 Montgomery Street in San Francisco. From this address he sold books and art (mostly prints), in a city that was still the booming "capital of the Gold Rush" in the "Wild West". There were already 40 bookstores and a dozen photography studios in town, and he even shared his address with a photo gallery, right next to another bookstore. He partnered with W.H. Oakes as an engraver and publisher of lithograph prints, and still functioned as a book agent for the London Printing and Publishing Company.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: In April 1858, Muybridge moved his store to 163 Clay Street, where his friend Silas Selleck now had a photo gallery. Muygridge was a member of the Mechanic's Institute of the City of San Francisco. In 1859, he was elected as one of the directors for the San Francisco Mercantile Library Association.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: Muybridge sold original landscape photography by Carleton Watkins, as well as photographic copies of paintings. It remains uncertain whether or not Muygridge personally made such copies, or familiarized himself with photographic techniques in any fashion before 1860, although Muybridge claimed in 1881 that he "came to California in 1855, and most of the time since and all of the time since 1860 (...) had been diligently, and at the same time studiously, been engaged in photography."


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: Edward's brother George Muybridge came to San Francisco in 1858 but died of tuberculosis soon after. Their youngest brother Thomas S. Muygridge arrived in 1859, and it soon became clear that Edward planned to stop operating his bookstore business. On 15 May 1860, Edward published a special announcement in the "Bulletin" newspaper: "I have this day sold to my brother, Thomas S. Muygridge, my entire stock of Books, Engravings, etc.(...) I shall on 5th June leave for New York, London, Berlin, Paris, Rome, and Vienna, etc." Although he altered his plans, he eventually took a cross-country stagecoach on 2 July to catch a ship in New York.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: In July 1860, Muybridge suffered a head injury in a violent runaway stagecoach crash at the Texas border, which killed the driver and one passenger, and badly injured every other passenger on board. Muybridge was ejected from the vehicle and hit his head on a rock or other hard object. He woke up in a hospital bed at Fort Smith, Arkansas, with no recollection of the nine days after he had taken supper at a wayside cabin away, not long before the accident. He suffered from a bad headache, double vision, deafness, loss of taste and smell, and confusion. It was later claimed that his hair turned from brown to grey in three days. The problems persisted fully for three months and to a lesser extent for a year.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: Arthur P. Shimamura, an experimental psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, has speculated that Muybridge suffered substantial injuries to the orbitofrontal cortex that probably also extended into the anterior temporal lobes, which may have led to some of the emotional, eccentric behaviour reported by friends in later years, as well as freeing his creativity from conventional social inhibitions. Today, there is still little effective treatment for this kind of injury.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: Muybridge was treated at Fort Smith for three weeks before he went to a doctor in New York City. He fled the noise of the city and stayed in the countryside. He then went back to New York for six weeks and sued the stage company, which earned him a $2,500 compensation. Eventually, he felt well enough to travel to England, where he received medical care from Sir William Gull (who was also personal physician to Queen Victoria), and was prescribed abstinence of meat, alcohol, and coffee for over a year. Gull also recommended rest and outdoor activities, and considering a change in profession.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: Muybridge stayed with his mother in Kennington and later with his aunt while in England. Muybridge later stated that he had become a photographer at the suggestion of Gull. However, while outdoors photography might have helped in getting some fresh air, dragging around heavy equipment and working with chemicals in a dark room did not comply with the prescriptions for rest that Gull preferred to offer.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: On 28 September 1860, "E. Muggeridge, of New York" applied for British patent no. 2352 for "An improved method of, and apparatus for, plate printing" via London solicitor August Frederick Sheppard.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: On 1 August 1861, Muygridge received British patent no. 1914 for "Improvements in machinery or apparatus for washing clothes and other textile articles". On 28 October the French version of this patent was registered. He wrote a letter to his uncle Henry, who had emigrated to Sydney (Australia), with details of the patents and he also mentioned having to visit Europe for business for several months. Muygridge's inventions (or rather: improved machinery) were demonstrated at the 1862 International Exhibition.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: Muybridge's activities and whereabouts between 1862 and 1865 are not very well documented. He turned up in Paris in 1862 and again in 1864. In 1865 he was one of the directors for the Austin Consolidated Silver Mines Company (limited) and for The Ottoman Company (limited)/The Bank of Turkey (limited), under his new name "Muybridge". Both enterprises were very short-lived due to the Panic of 1866, and Muybridge chaired the meetings in which the companies were dissolved during the spring of 1866.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: Muybridge may have taken up photography sometime between 1861 and 1866. He possibly learned the wet-plate collodion process in England, and was possibly influenced by some of well-known English photographers of those years, such as Julia Margaret Cameron, Lewis Carroll, and Roger Fenton. However, it remains unclear how much he had already learned before the accident and how much he may have learned after his return to the United States.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: Muybridge returned to San Francisco on 13 February 1867 a changed man. Reportedly his hair had turned from black to grey within three days after his 1860 accident. Friends and associates later stated that he had changed from a smart and pleasant businessman into an eccentric artist. He was much more careless about his appearance, was easily agitated, could suddenly take objection to people and soon after act like nothing had happened, and he would regularly misstate previously-arranged business deals. His care about whether he judged something to be beautiful had become much stronger than his care for money; he easily refused payment if a customer seemed to be slightly critical of his work. Photographer Silas Selleck, who had known Muybridge from New York since circa 1852 and had been a close friend since 1855, claimed that he could hardly recognize Muybridge after his return.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: Muybridge converted a lightweight two-wheel, one-horse carriage into a portable darkroom to carry out his work, and with a logo on the back dubbed it "Helios' Flying Studio". He had acquired highly proficient technical skills and an artist's eye, and became very successful in photography, focusing principally on landscape and architectural subjects. An 1868 advertisement stated a wide scope of subjects: "Helios is prepared to accept commissions to photograph Private Residences, Ranches, Mills, Views, Animals, Ships, etc., anywhere in the city, or any portion of the Pacific Coast. Architects', Surveyors' and Engineers' Drawings copied mathamatically (sic) correct. Photographic copies of Paintings and Works of Art."


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: Muybridge constantly tinkered with his cameras and chemicals, trying to improve the sales appeal of his pictures. In 1869, he patented a "sky shade" to reduce the tendency of intense blue outdoors skies to bleach out the images of the blue-sensitive photographic emulsions of the time. An article published in 2017 and an expanded book document that Muybridge heavily edited and modified his photos, inserting clouds or the moon, even adding volcanos to his pictures for artistic effects.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: Helios produced over 400 different stereograph cards, initially sold through Seleck's Cosmopolitan Gallery at 415 Montgomery Street, and later through other distributors, such as Bradley & Rulofson. Many of these cards showed views of San Francisco and its surroundings. Stereo cards were extremely popular at the time and thus could be sold in large quantities for a very low price, to tourists as a souvenir, or to proud citizens and collectors.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: Early in his new career, Muybridge was hired by Robert B. Woodward (1824–1879) to take extensive photos of his Woodward's Gardens, a combination amusement park, zoo, museum, and aquarium that had opened in San Francisco in 1866.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: During the construction of the San Francisco Mint in 1870–1872, Muybridge made a series of images of the building's progress, documenting changes over time in a fashion similar to time-lapse photography. These images may have attracted the attention of Leland Stanford, who would later hire Muybridge to develop an unprecedented series of photos spaced in time.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: From June to November 1867, Muybridge visited Yosemite Valley He took enormous safety risks to make his photographs, using a heavy view camera and stacks of glass plate negatives. A stereograph he published in 1872 shows him sitting casually on a projecting rock over the Yosemite Valley, with of empty space yawning below him. He returned with numerous stereoscopic views and larger plates. He selected 20 pictures to be retouched and manipulated for a subscription series that he announced in February 1868. Twenty original photographs (possibly the same) were used to illustrate John S. Hittel's guide book "Yosemite: Its Wonders and Its Beauties" (1868).


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: Some of the pictures were taken of the same scenes shot by his contemporary Carleton Watkins. Muybridge's photographs showed the grandeur and expansiveness of the West; if human figures were portrayed, they were dwarfed by their surroundings, as in Chinese landscape paintings. In comparing the styles of the two photographers, Watkins has been called "a classicist, making serene, stately pictures of a still, eternal world of beauty", while Muybridge was "a romantic who sought out the uncanny, the unsettling, the uncertain". In the 21st century there have been claims that many landscape photos attributed to Muybridge were actually made by or under the close guidance of Watkins, but these claims are disputed. Regardless, Muybridge started to develop his own leading-edge innovations in photography, especially in the capturing of ever-faster motion.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: In 1868, Muybridge was commissioned by the US government to travel to the newly acquired US territory of Alaska to photograph the Tlingit Native Americans, occasional Russian inhabitants, and dramatic landscapes.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: In 1871, the United States Lighthouse Board hired Muybridge to photograph lighthouses of the American West Coast. From March to July, he travelled aboard the Lighthouse Tender "Shubrick" to document these structures.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: In 1873, Muybridge was commissioned by the US Army to photograph the "Modoc War" dispute with the Native American tribe in northern California and Oregon. A number of these photographs were carefully staged and posed for maximum effect, despite the long exposures required by the slow photographic emulsions of the time.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: In 1872, the former governor of California, Leland Stanford, a businessman and race-horse owner, hired Muybridge for a portfolio depicting his mansion and other possessions, including his racehorse Occident.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: Stanford also wanted a proper picture of the horse at full speed, and was frustrated that the existing depictions and descriptions seemed incorrect. The human eye could not fully break down the action at the quick gaits of the trot and gallop. 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. There are stories that Stanford had made a $25,000 bet on his theories about horse locomotion, but no evidence has been found of such a wager. Instead, it has been estimated that he would spend a total of $50,000 over the next several years, to fund his investigations.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: In 1873, Muybridge managed to use a single camera to shoot a small and very fuzzy picture of the racehorse Occident running, at Union Park racetrack in Sacramento. Because of the insensitivity of the photographic emulsions used, early pictures were little more than blurry silhouettes. They both agreed that the image lacked quality, but Stanford was excited to finally have a reliable depiction of a running horse. No copy of this earliest image has yet resurfaced.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: Muybridge promised to study better solutions, but his work on higher-speed photography would take several years to develop, and was also delayed by events in his personal life. With the aid of engineers and technicians from the Central Pacific Railroad (Stanford was one of the founding directors), Muybridge experimented with ever-faster mechanical shutters, and began developing state-of-the-art electrically-triggered mechanisms. He also experimented with more sensitive photographic emulsions to work with the shorter exposure times.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: In July 1877, Muybridge made a new picture of Occident at full speed, with improved techniques and a much clearer result. To enhance the still-fuzzy picture, he had it recreated by a retouch artist and published as a cabinet card. The news about this breakthrough in instantaneous photography was spread enthusiastically, but several critics believed that the heavily-manipulated image could not be a truthful depiction of the horse. Muybridge allowed reporters to study the original negative, but as he and Stanford were planning a new project that would convince everyone, they saw no need to prove that this image was authentic. The original negative has not yet resurfaced.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: In June 1878, Muybridge created sequential series of photographs, now with a battery of 12 cameras along the race track at Stanford's Palo Alto Stock Farm (now the campus of Stanford University). The shutters were automatically triggered when the wheel of a cart or the breast or legs of a horse tripped wires connected to an electromagnetic circuit. For a session on 15 June 1878, the press and a selection of turf men were invited to witness the process. An accident with a snapping strap was captured on the negatives and shown to the attendees, convincing even the most sceptical witnesses. The news of this success was reported worldwide.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: "The Daily Alta California" reported that Muybridge first exhibited magic lantern projected slides of the photographs at the San Francisco Art Association on 8 July 1878. Newspapers were not yet able to reproduce detailed photographs, so the images were widely printed as woodcut engravings. "Scientific American" was among the publications at the time that carried reports and engravings of Muybridge's groundbreaking images. Six different series were soon published as cabinet cards, entitled "The Horse in Motion".


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: Many people were amazed at the previously unseen positions of the horse's legs and the fact that a running horse at regular intervals had all four hooves in the air. This did not take place when the horse's legs were extended to the front and back, as imagined by contemporary illustrators, but when its legs were collected beneath its body as it switched from "pulling" with the front legs to "pushing" with the back legs.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: In 1879, Muybridge continued with additional studies using 24 cameras, and published a very limited edition portfolio of the results.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: Muybridge had images from his motion studies hand-copied in the form of silhouettes or line drawings onto a disc, to be viewed in the machine he had invented, which he called a "zoopraxiscope". Later, his more-detailed images were hand-coloured and marketed commercially. A device he developed was later regarded as an early movie projector, and the process was an intermediate stage toward motion pictures or cinematography.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: In 1878, Muybridge made a notable 13-part 360° photographic panorama of San Francisco. He presented a copy to the wife of Leland Stanford. Today, it can be viewed on the Internet as a seamlessly-spliced panorama, or as a QuickTime Virtual Reality (QTVR) panorama.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: That same year, he applied for a patent on a camera sequence shutter to photograph moving objects, with a mechanical trigger. Later that year, he applied for a further patent, this time using an electrical trigger. He also filed for British and French patents.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: On 20 May 1871, 41-year-old Muybridge married 21-year-old divorcee Flora Shallcross Stone (née Downs). The differences in their tastes and temperaments were understood to have been due to their age difference. Muybridge did not care for many of the amusements that she sought, so she went to the theatre and other attractions without him, and he seemed to be fine with that. Muybridge was more of the type that would stay up all night to read classics. Muybridge was also used to leaving home by himself for days, weeks or even months, visiting faraway places for personal projects or assignments. This did not change after his marriage.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: At some stage, Flora became romantically involved with one of their friends, Harry Larkyns. Muybridge intervened several times and believed the affair was over when he sent Flora to stay with a relative and Larkyns found a job at a mine near Calistoga, California. In mid-October 1874, Muybridge learned how serious the relationship between his wife and Larkyns really was. Flora's maternity nurse revealed many details and she had in her possession some love letters that the couple had still been writing to each other. At her place, Muybridge also came across a picture of Florado with "Harry" written on the back in Flora's handwriting, suggesting that she believed the child to be fathered by Larkyns.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: On 17 October, Muybridge went to Calistoga to track down Larkyns. Upon finding him, Muybridge said, "I have a message for you from my wife", and shot him point-blank. Larkyns died that night, and Muybridge was arrested without protest and put in the Napa jail.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: A "Sacramento Daily Union" reporter visited Muybridge in jail for an hour and related how he was coping with the situation. Muybridge was in moderately good spirits and very hopeful. He felt he was treated very kindly by the officers and was a little proud of the influence he had on other inmates, which had earned him everyone's respect. He had protested the abuse of a "Chinaman" from a tough inmate, by claiming "No man of any country whose misfortunes shall bring him here shall be abused in my presence" and had strongly but politely voiced threats against the offender. He had addressed an outburst of profanity in a similar fashion.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: Flora filed for divorce on 17 December 1874 on the grounds of extreme cruelty, but this first petition was dismissed. It was reported that she fully sympathized with the prosecution of her husband.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: Muybridge was tried for murder in February 1875. His attorney, W. W. Pendegast (a friend of Stanford), pleaded insanity in his behalf due to a severe head injury suffered in the 1860 stagecoach accident. At least four long-time acquaintances testified under oath that the accident had dramatically changed Muybridge's personality, from genial and pleasant to unstable and erratic. During the trial, Muybridge undercut his own insanity case by indicating that his actions were deliberate and premeditated, but he also showed impassive indifference and uncontrolled explosions of emotion. In the end he was acquitted on the grounds of justifiable homicide, with the jury explanation that if their verdict was not in accordance with the law, it was in accordance with the law of human nature. In other words: they believed they could not punish a person for doing something that they themselves would do in similar circumstances.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: The episode interrupted his photography studies, but not his relationship with Stanford, who had arranged for his criminal defence. By 1877, Muybridge had resumed his photographic work for Stanford.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: Shortly after his acquittal in February 1875, Muybridge left the United States on a previously planned 9-month photography trip to Central America, now acting as a "working exile". His photographs from this period are less known, because relatively few copies were produced. It is believed that during this period, he further developed his ability to take pictures more rapidly, due to the requirement that these processes be performed aboard a constantly-rolling ship.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: Flora's second petition for divorce received a favourable ruling, and an order for alimony was entered in April 1875. Flora died suddenly in July 1875 while Muybridge was in Central America. She had placed their son, Florado Helios Muybridge (later nicknamed "Floddie" by friends), with a French couple. In 1876, Muybridge had the boy moved from a Catholic orphanage to a Protestant one and paid for his care. Otherwise he had little to do with him.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: Photographs of Florado Muybridge as an adult show him to have strongly resembled Muybridge. Put to work on a ranch as a boy, he worked all his life as a ranch hand and gardener. In 1944, Florado was hit by a car in Sacramento and killed.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: Today, the court case and transcripts are important to historians and forensic neurologists, because of the sworn testimony from multiple witnesses regarding Muybridge's state of mind and past behaviour.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: In 1982, American composer Philip Glass would create an opera, "The Photographer", with a libretto based in part on court transcripts from the case.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: Muybridge often travelled to American cities as well as back to England and Europe to publicise his work. The opening of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869 and the development of steamships made travel much faster and less arduous than it was in 1860. On 13 March 1882 he lectured at the Royal Institution in London in front of a sell-out audience, which included members of the Royal Family, notably the future King Edward VII. He displayed his photographs on screen and showed moving pictures projected by his zoopraxiscope. He also lectured at the Royal Academy of Arts and the Royal Society.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: Muybridge and Stanford had a major falling-out concerning his research on equine locomotion. Stanford had asked his friend and horseman Dr JBD Stillman to write a book analysing "The Horse in Motion", which was published in 1882. Stillman used Muybridge's photos as the basis for his 100 illustrations, and the photographer's research for the analysis, but he gave Muybridge no prominent credit. The historian Phillip Prodger later suggested that Stanford considered Muybridge as just one of his employees, and not deserving of special recognition. Stanford was quite proud of his role in creating the book, and commissioned a portrait of himself by Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, in which a copy of the volume was visible under his arm.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: However, as a result of Muybridge not being credited in the book, the Royal Society of Arts withdrew an offer to fund his stop-motion studies in photography, and refused to publish a paper he had submitted, accusing him of plagiarism. Muybridge filed a lawsuit against Stanford to gain credit, but it was delayed two years and then dismissed out of court. Stillman's book did not sell as expected. Muybridge, looking elsewhere for funding, was more successful. The Royal Society of Arts eventually invited Muybridge back to show his work.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: In 1883, Muybridge gave a lecture at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA), arranged by artist Thomas Eakins and University of Pennsylvania (Penn) trustee Fairman Rogers. At that time, Eakins was a faculty member at PAFA, and had recently been appointed its director. A group of Philadelphians, including Penn Provost William Pepper and the publisher J.B. Lippincott recruited him to work at Penn under their sponsorship. Between 1883 and 1886, Muybridge made more than 100,000 images, working obsessively in a dedicated studio at the northeast corner of 36th and Pine streets in Philadelphia. He was now able to afford multiple larger high-quality lenses, giving him the ability to make simultaneous pictures from multiple viewpoints, with a clarity and tonal range not achieved earlier.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: In 1884, Eakins briefly worked alongside Muybridge, to learn more about the application of photography to the study of human and animal motion. Eakins later favoured the use of multiple exposures superimposed on a single photographic negative to study motion more precisely, while Muybridge continued to use multiple cameras to produce separate images which could also be projected by his zoopraxiscope.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: The vast majority of Muybridge's work at this time was done at a special sunlit outdoor studio, due to the still-bulky cameras and relatively slow photographic emulsion speeds then available. Most of the photographs were taken during the summers, and winters were spent developing and organizing the images. He used banks of 12 custom-made cameras to photograph professors, athletes, students, disabled patients from the Blockley Almshouse (located next to Penn at the time), and local residents, all in motion. He photographed at least 9 sequences showing the movements of neurological patients. He also borrowed animals from the Philadelphia Zoo, to study their movements in detail.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: The human models, usually either entirely nude or very lightly clothed, were photographed against a measured grid background in a variety of action sequences, including walking up or down stairs, hammering on an anvil, carrying buckets of water, or throwing water over one another. Muybridge produced sequences showing farm, industrial, construction, and household work, military manoeuvres, and everyday activities. He also photographed athletic activities such as baseball, cricket, boxing, wrestling, discus throwing, and a ballet dancer performing. Showing a single-minded dedication to scientific accuracy and artistic composition, Muybridge himself posed nude for some of the photographic sequences, such as one showing him swinging a miner's pick. Toward the end of this period, Muybridge spent much of his time selecting and editing his photos in preparation for publication.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: In 1887, the photos were published as a massive collotype portfolio in 11 volumes, with 781 plates comprising 20,000 of the photographs, in a groundbreaking collection titled "". Muybridge's work contributed substantially to developments in the science of biomechanics and the mechanics of athletics. Some of his books are still published today, and are used as references by artists, animators, and students of animal and human movement.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: In 1888, the University of Pennsylvania donated an album of Muybridge's photographs, which featured students and Philadelphia Zoo animals, to the sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Abdul Hamid II, who had a keen interest in photography. This gift may have helped to secure permissions for the excavations that scholars from the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology later pursued in the Ottoman region of Mesopotamia (now Iraq), notably at the site of Nippur. The Ottoman sultan reciprocated, five years later, by sending as a gift to the United States a collection of photograph albums featuring Ottoman scenes: the Library of Congress now preserves these albums as the Abdul Hamid II Collection.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: Recent scholarship has noted that in his later work, Muybridge was influenced by, and in turn, influenced the French photographer Étienne-Jules Marey. In 1881, Muybridge first visited Marey's studio in France and viewed stop-motion studies before returning to the US to further his own work in the same area. Marey was a pioneer in producing multiple-exposure, sequential images using a rotary shutter in his so-called "Marey wheel" camera.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: While Marey's scientific achievements in the realms of cardiology and aerodynamics (as well as pioneering work in photography and chronophotography) are indisputable, Muybridge's efforts were to some degree more artistic rather than scientific. As Muybridge explained, in some of his published sequences he had substituted images where original exposures had failed, in order to illustrate a representative movement (rather than producing a strictly scientific recording of a particular sequence).


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: 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.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: After his work at the University of Pennsylvania, Muybridge travelled widely and gave numerous lectures and demonstrations of his still photography and primitive motion picture sequences. At the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, Muybridge presented a series of lectures on the "Science of Animal Locomotion" in the Zoopraxographical Hall, built specially for that purpose in the "Midway Plaisance" arm of the exposition. He used his zoopraxiscope to show his moving pictures to a paying public. The Hall was the first commercial movie theatre. He also sold a series of souvenir phenakistoscope discs to demonstrate simple animations, using painted colour images derived from his photographs.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: Eadweard Muybridge returned to his native England in 1894 and continued to lecture extensively throughout Great Britain. He returned to the US once more, in 1896–1897, to settle financial affairs and to dispose of property related to his work at the University of Pennsylvania. He retained control of his negatives, which he used to publish two popular books of his work, "Animals in Motion" (1899) and "The Human Figure in Motion" (1901), both of which remain in print over a century later.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: Muybridge died on 8 May 1904 in Kingston upon Thames of prostate cancer at the home of his cousin Catherine Smith. It is claimed that at that time, he was excavating a scale model of the American Great Lakes in the back garden. His body was cremated, and its ashes interred in a grave at Woking in Surrey. On the grave's headstone his name is misspelled as "Eadweard Maybridge".


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: In 2004, a British Film Institute commemorative plaque was installed on the outside wall of the former Smith house, at Park View, 2 Liverpool Road. Many of his papers and collected artefacts were donated to Kingston Library, and are currently under the ownership of Kingston Museum in his place of birth.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: According to an exhibition at Tate Britain, "His influence has forever changed our understanding and interpretation of the world, and can be found in many diverse fields, from Marcel Duchamp's painting "Nude Descending a Staircase" and countless works by Francis Bacon, to the blockbuster film "The Matrix" and Philip Glass's opera "The Photographer"."


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: In 2010, the American painter Philip Pearlstein published an article in "ARTnews" suggesting the strong influences Muybridge's work and public lectures had on 20th-century artists, including Degas, Rodin, Seurat, Duchamp, and Eakins, either directly or through the contemporaneous work of his fellow photographic pioneer, Marey. He concluded: "I believe that both Muybridge and Eakins—as a photographer—should be recognized as among the most influential artists on the ideas of 20th-century art, along with Cézanne, whose lessons in fractured vision provided the technical basis for putting those ideas together."


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: Muybridge bequeathed a selection of his equipment to Kingston Museum in Greater London. This includes his original biunial slide lantern, a zoopraxiscope projector, over 2,000 glass magic lantern slides and 67 zoopraxiscope discs. The University of Pennsylvania Archives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, hold a large collection of Muybridge's photographs, equipment, and correspondence. Among these artefacts are 740 of the 781 original glass plate negatives used for publication of his masterwork edition.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: The Philadelphia Museum of Art also holds a large collection of Muybridge material, including hundreds of collotype prints, gelatin internegatives, glass plate positives, phenakistoscope cards, and camera equipment, totalling just under 800 objects. The Stanford University Libraries and the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University also maintain a large collection of Muybridge's photographs, glass plate negatives, and some equipment including a functioning zoopraxiscope.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: In 1991, the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, hosted a major exhibition of Muybridge's work, plus the works of many other artists who had been influenced by him. The show later travelled to other venues and a book-length exhibition catalogue was also published. The Addison Gallery has significant holdings of Muybridge's photographic work.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: In 1993, the Canadian Centre for Architecture presented the exhibition "Eadweard Muybridge and the Photographic Panorama of San Francisco, 1850-1880".


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: In 2000–2001, the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History presented the exhibition "Freeze Frame: Eadweard Muybridge's Photography of Motion", plus an online virtual exhibit.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: From 10 April to 18 July 2010, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, mounted a major retrospective of Muybridge's work entitled "Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change". The exhibit received favourable reviews from major publications including "The New York Times". The exhibition travelled in autumn 2010 to Tate Britain, Millbank, London, and also appeared at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: An exhibition of important items bequeathed by Muybridge to his birthplace of Kingston upon Thames, entitled "Muybridge Revolutions", opened at the Kingston Museum on 18 September 2010 (exactly a century since the first Muybridge exhibition at the Museum) and ran until 12 February 2011. The full collection is held by the Museum and Archives.


title: Eadweard Muybridge

text: Muybridge's influence extended to many artists and beyond, including efficiency expert Frank Gilbreth, entrepreneur Walt Disney, Nobel-Prize chemist Ahmed Zewail, and the International Society of Biomechanics.


title: Sandrine Holt

text: Sandrine Claire Holt (born Sandrine Vanessa Ho; 19 November 1972) is a British-born Canadian model and actress.


title: Sandrine Holt

text: Holt was born Sandrine Vanessa Ho in Croydon. Her middle name was later changed to Claire. Her father, Man Shun ("Horace") Ho, is Chinese. Ho was educated at the University of London, receiving a (B.Sc Physics and Applied Mathematics; M.Sc Computer Science). Her mother, Christiane (née Nicolette), is French. At age five, she and her family moved to Toronto, Canada. Holt attended St. Joseph's Morrow Park Catholic Secondary School in Willowdale. She worked as a runway model in Paris before she became an actress. Her younger sister is model and designer Adrianne Ho.


title: Sandrine Holt

text: Holt's acting debut, credited as Sandrine Ho, was in a 1989 episode of "" entitled "Face of Evil". Her feature film debut was in "Black Robe" in 1991. Subsequent film and television appearances include roles in "Rapa-Nui", "Once a Thief", "" and "".


title: Sandrine Holt

text: In 2006, she appeared in a recurring role on the television series "24" as Evelyn Martin, the aide to First Lady Martha Logan. In 2007 she appeared in the recurring role of Catherine Rothberg in Showtime's series "The L Word".


title: Sandrine Holt

text: In 2012, she appeared in "" as Lida, an Antigen employee who took care of the protagonist's daughter, a prisoner named Subject Two.


title: Sandrine Holt

text: In 2013 she appeared in the first season of "House of Cards" as Gillian Cole, the leader of a grass-roots organization called World Well that provides clean water to developing countries.


title: Sandrine Holt

text: In 2016, she appeared in " MacGyver" as Patricia Thornton, an ex-field agent turned director of operations for DXS.


title: Sandrine Holt

text: In 2018, she had a recurring role on "" as Dr. Lisa Abernathy, a clinical psychologist who assesses defendants before their trials.


title: Looop Lapeta

text: Looop Lapeta is 2022 Indian Hindi-language comedy thriller film directed by Aakash Bhatia and jointly produced by Sony Pictures Films India, Ellipsis Entertainment and Aayush Maheshwari. An official adaptation of the award-winning German film "Run Lola Run" by Tom Tykwer, the film stars Taapsee Pannu and Tahir Raj Bhasin in the lead roles. The film premiered on 4 February 2022 on Netflix.


title: Looop Lapeta

text: Savina "Savi" Borkar is a promising track-and-field athlete whose career is ruined by a knee injury. While recovering from surgery at the hospital, she decides to commit suicide, only to be stopped by Satyajeet "Satya", a small-time, never-to-do-well crook. They fall in love and begin a relationship, which her father Atul disapproves of. One day, Satya is tasked by his boss Victor to deliver a package (implied to be a narcotics consignment) to an address and collect ₹ 5,000,000 in 80 minutes. Satya delivers the package and collects the cash, but decides to gamble it, so he can return Victor's share and keep the winnings for himself. While on his way to a casino, he gets high with a stranger and loses the bag of cash on a bus. Realizing his life is in danger if he doesn't return Victor's money, Satya calls Savi in a panic. Savi, who has just found out that she's pregnant, decides to ask Atul for the money.


title: Looop Lapeta

text: On her way to Atul's gym, Savi interacts with Jacob, a cab driver whose girlfriend Julia is marrying another man. Jacob refuses to drive Savi, so she vandalizes his cab, attracting the attention of policeman David. Savi asks Atul for money, but they get into an argument as Atul was her coach and their relationship soured after Savi's injury. Savi blames Atul for dating a man after her mother's death. The two cannot reconcile and Savi leaves empty-handed. David spots her and gives chase but she evades him by hiding at Julia's wedding. Meanwhile, bumbling brothers Appu and Gappu plan to rob their father Mamlesh's jewelry store. Satya arrives at the store with the same idea, and a Mexican standoff ensues. Savi distracts everyone by throwing a brick through a glass window, allowing Satya to escape with the money. However, the brothers catch up to them in an alley, and Mamlesh arrives and shoots and kills Satya. Over a flashback, Satya relates the story of Savitri, who tricked Yama, the god of death, into sparing her husband Satyavan, despite Satyavan being fated to die. The day then resets to Savi finding out that she's pregnant, essentially granting her a second chance at saving Satya.


title: Looop Lapeta

text: As the second iteration begins, Savi takes Satya's call and asks him to stay put and not chase after the bus. As she tries to reach her father's gym, she gets into an altercation with a man, once again attracting the attention of David, who chases her into Jacob's cab and forces Jacob to drive at gunpoint, but they crash into the bus containing the cash. Savi, relatively unharmed, steals David's gun and holds Atul at gunpoint, but he doesn't have any money. As she leaves the gym, David chases her into Julia's wedding, and she hides in Julia's dressing room. There, Julia rants about the difficult situation she finds herself in, since she wants to marry Jacob. Mean while Jacob however climbs till the baranda of Julie's room. However, Savi advises her to leave Jacob and go through with the wedding, which Jacob overhears. As Julia takes the advice and kisses her husband-to-be Robert, a shocked Jacob falls off the balcony and severely injures himself. As Satya wanders near the jewelry store, he gets into an argument with the brothers and they take his gun. When Savi arrives, she tells Satya that they will rob the brothers once the brothers have robbed the shop. This plan works, but Jacob arrives and kills Satya as revenge for Savi ruining his life. The day resets again.


title: Looop Lapeta

text: Once the third iteration sets into motion, Savi decides to right her wrongs in order to manipulate events to save Satya. She apologizes to her father and the two reconcile, each agreeing to make an effort to get along with the other's boyfriend. She gets into Jacob's cab and convinces him that he must fight for Julia if he truly loves her. They drive to the wedding, where Savi helps Jacob and Julia elope. She steals a bag containing cash gifts for the wedding, then gambles that money and wins big, gaining enough cash to pay Victor back. Meanwhile, the brothers create a fake kidnapping situation so they can extract ransom money from their father. When Satya goes to rob the store, Mamlesh recognizes him as a former customer and hatches a plan with him to fake a robbery to collect insurance money. When the brothers arrive to act out the kidnapping, Mamlesh turns on Satya, only to realize that Satya had emptied his gun. As Satya leaves the store with the money, David and the police are responding to the hostage situation, but mistake him for a civilian and let him go. Satya meets with Savi and she reveals she is pregnant; they decide to get married. They deliver Victor's cash, and still have Savi's winnings left over. As the film ends, Satya notices the stranger on the bus who took his bag and begins chasing after him.


title: Looop Lapeta

text: The principal photography of the film began in November 2020 and wrapped up in February 2021. Yash Khanna and Saumit Deshpande handled the cinematography for the entire shoot.


title: Looop Lapeta

text: The soundtrack of the film has songs composed by Sidhant Mago, Mayank Mehra, Santanu Ghatak, Rahul Pais and Nariman Khambata, with lyrics written by Sidhant Mago, Santanu Ghatak and Siddhant Kaushal.


title: Looop Lapeta

text: Umesh Punwani of "Koimoi" rated the film 4 out of 5 stars and wrote ""Looop Lapeta" not just touches a technical peak but is also backed by an extremely strong story & memorable performances. A visually appealing, soul-satisfying experience". Stutee Ghosh of "The Quint" rated the film 3.5 out of 5 stars and wrote "It's this playfulness that ultimately works for "Looop Lapeta" though a tighter edit would have heightened its impact". Renuka Vyavahare of "The Times Of India" rated the film 3.5 out of 5 stars and wrote "Looop Lapeta is a refreshing attempt to move beyond the mundane".


title: Heroes of Might and Magic

text: Heroes of Might and Magic, known as Might & Magic Heroes since 2011, is a series of video games originally created and developed by Jon Van Caneghem through New World Computing.


title: Heroes of Might and Magic

text: As part of the "Might and Magic" franchise, the series changed ownership when NWC was acquired by 3DO and again when 3DO closed down and sold the rights to Ubisoft.<ref name="3DO/Ubi"></ref> The games feature turn-based, fantasy-themed conflicts in which players control armies of mythical creatures. The series began in 1995 with the release of the first title. A seventh installment, "Might & Magic Heroes VII", was released on September 29, 2015.


title: Heroes of Might and Magic

text: New World Computing closed after the production of "Heroes of Might and Magic IV", and since then the rights to the franchise have been owned by Ubisoft. Nival Interactive developed the first game in the series since the changeover, "Heroes of Might and Magic V". Black Hole Entertainment developed its sequel "Might & Magic Heroes VI", but Limbic Entertainment developed later patches and the DLC, as well as "Might & Magic Heroes VII". Virtuos developed the "Shades of Darkness" standalone expansion for "Heroes VI".


title: Heroes of Might and Magic

text: The series is directed primarily at the DOS and Windows platforms, with sporadic support for macOS over the years. In addition to Windows and Mac platforms, "Heroes II" was ported to RISC OS and "Heroes III" was ported to Linux. GameTap carried the first four games in the series beginning in 2006. Remakes have also appeared on the Game Boy Color.


title: Heroes of Might and Magic

text: "King's Bounty" (1990), an earlier game from New World Computing, largely anticipated the design of "Heroes" and is included in some "Heroes" anthologies. It was later remade and branded as a "Heroes" title for the PlayStation 2 game, "Quest for the Dragon Bone Staff". A sequel to "King's Bounty" was released in 2008 as "".


title: Heroes of Might and Magic

text: The "Heroes" series is within the genre of turn-based strategy. The titular heroes are player characters who can recruit armies, move around the map, capture resources, and engage in combat. The heroes also incorporate some role-playing game elements; they possess a set of statistics that confer bonuses to an army, artifacts that enhance their powers, and knowledge of magical spells that can be used to attack enemies or produce strategic benefits. Also, heroes gain experience levels from battle, such that veteran heroes are significantly more powerful than inexperienced ones. Experienced heroes may persist through a campaign, but generally do not carry over between scenarios.


title: Heroes of Might and Magic

text: On a typical map, players begin a game with one town of a chosen alignment. The number of different alignments varies throughout the series, with the lowest count of four appearing initially in "Heroes I" and peaking at nine in the "Heroes III" expansion "Armageddon's Blade". Each town alignment hosts a unique selection of creatures from which the player can build an army. Town alignment also determines other unique traits such as native hero classes, special bonuses or abilities, and leanings toward certain skills or kinds of magic.


title: Heroes of Might and Magic

text: Towns play a central role in the games since they are the primary source of income and new recruits. A typical objective in each game is to capture all enemy towns. Maps may also start with neutral towns, which do not send out heroes but may still be captured by any player. It is therefore possible, and common, to have more towns than players on a map. When captured, a town retains its alignment type, allowing the new owner to create a mixed army, although Heroes VI introduces the ability to change a town's alignment to the capturing player's. A player or team is eliminated when no towns or heroes are left under their control, or they do not control a town for seven consecutive days. Barring any special conditions, the last player or team remaining is the victor.


title: Heroes of Might and Magic

text: A side objective commonly appearing in the series is the acquisition of a powerful object called the "ultimate artifact" ("Heroes I" and "II"), grail ("III" and "IV"), or Tear of Asha ("V", "VI", and "VII"), buried somewhere on the map. In all games except "Heroes VI", heroes visit special locations (called obelisks, or oracles in "Heroes IV") to gradually reveal a map of the location of the artifact; in "Heroes VI", a hero must instead collect four Fragments of the Moon Disc, which then causes the Tear of Asha to appear somewhere on the map. The ultimate artifact provides immense bonuses to the hero that carries it; the grail or Tear of Asha allows the hero to construct a special building in one of their towns that confers immense bonuses to the player.


title: Heroes of Might and Magic

text: Each turn (consisting of all players' moves) is represented as a single day, and days are organized into cycles of weeks and months (measured as four weeks). The primary resource is gold, which is generated by towns on a daily basis. Gold alone is sufficient for obtaining basic buildings and most creatures. As construction progresses, increasing amounts of secondary resources such as wood, ore, gems, crystals, sulfur, and mercury are required. These resources, as well as gold, are produced at mines and other secondary structures, which are located on the map and require heroes to capture them. As with towns, mines can also be captured by enemy heroes, presenting an additional avenue for conflict.


title: Heroes of Might and Magic

text: At the start of each week (each day in "Heroes IV"), creature dwellings produce new recruits, and in most cases neutral armies will increase in size (by default; can be turned off if desired). In some of the games, the start of a new month causes neutral armies to spawn all over the map, providing fresh challenges and opportunities.


title: Heroes of Might and Magic

text: Whenever a player engages in battle, the game changes from the adventure map display to a combat screen, which is based on either a hexagonal or square grid. In this mode, the game mimics the turn-based tactics genre, as the engaged armies must carry through the battle without the opportunity to reinforce or gracefully retreat. With few exceptions, combat must end with the losing army deserting, being destroyed, or paying a heavy price in gold to surrender. Surrendering allows the player to keep the remaining units intact.


title: Heroes of Might and Magic

text: Creatures in an army are represented by unit stacks, each of which consists of a single type of creature, in any quantity. A limited number of stacks are available to each army, varying by game. Players generally maneuver their stacks attempting to achieve the most favorable rate of attrition for themselves. The games also have an automatic combat option that allows the computer to make tactical choices for a player. Heroes participate in battle as well: passively by granting bonuses to their army, and actively by engaging in combat and casting spells. In most of the games, heroes do not act as units, and cannot be harmed. However, in "Heroes IV" they do act as regular units and can be "killed"; these dead heroes are transferred to the nearest town's dungeon where they can be freed if their team captures the town.


title: Heroes of Might and Magic

text: Combat is affected by several random factors. In addition to simulating dice rolls to determine damage, a variety of influences including hero abilities and special bonuses determine a unit's luck and morale ratings, which affect the likelihood of those units triggering a bonus during combat. A unit that triggers good luck deals more (or receives less) damage, and a unit that triggers high morale receives an extra turn. In some other games, luck and morale can also be negative, with opposite corresponding effects. Luck and morale can be improved by hero abilities, artifacts, and spells. Morale may suffer with overwhelming odds in combat or by mixing incompatible unit types (e.g. Chaos with Order.)


title: Heroes of Might and Magic

text: Knowledge allows heroes to cast more spells, either through a spell memorization (HoMM I) or spell point (II-V) system.


title: Heroes of Might and Magic

text: "Heroes II" introduced secondary skills. Heroes can learn a limited variety of secondary skills with several levels of proficiency. Secondary skills give specific, miscellaneous bonuses to heroes and their armies. For example, skill in logistics increases the distance a hero's army can travel, while skill in leadership gives their army a morale bonus.


title: Heroes of Might and Magic

text: Beginning with "Heroes II", some creatures were able to be upgraded. By "Heroes III", every creature (excluding those not found in any castle) was able to be upgraded.


title: Heroes of Might and Magic

text: "Heroes III" also introduced a new artifact platform; rather than having 14 spaces for any artifact, the player instead has a much larger backpack, but can only use a limited number. For example, only one headpiece can be used at a time, as well as only one pair of boots, etc.


title: Heroes of Might and Magic

text: Games in the series often include a map editor and/or random map generator. Several fansites collect and rate user-generated maps.


title: Heroes of Might and Magic

text: Up until "Heroes of Might and Magic V", the "Heroes" series took place in the same fictional universe as the "Might and Magic" series, and later "Might and Magic" installments heavily referenced the games, with some taking place in the same world.


title: Heroes of Might and Magic

text: "" and "II" take place on the planet of Enroth, on a northerly continent of the same name, and chronicle the adventures of the Ironfist dynasty. The protagonist of "Heroes I" is Lord Morglin Ironfist, a knight who discovers a portal to the realm of Enroth while fleeing from his throne's usurpers, and goes on to conquer and dominate the continent, establishing a unified kingdom and a new rule.


title: Heroes of Might and Magic

text: "Heroes II" featured a two-sided conflict between Morglin's sons, Roland and Archibald, both vying for their deceased father's throne. Canonically, Roland defeats Archibald, though the player can choose to align themself with either side. It was the first game in the series to feature playable heroes as campaign characters—the main characters of "Heroes I" were represented by the player's presence rather than as commanders on the battlefield.


title: Heroes of Might and Magic

text: The storylines of "Heroes III" and the "Heroes Chronicles" shift focus to the Gryphonheart dynasty on the southern continent of Antagarich, and introduces the Kreegan as playable characters and enemies. In "Heroes III", Queen Catherine Gryphonheart, King Roland Ironfist's wife, is called home to attend her father's funeral, to discover Antagarich being torn apart by various factions. "Heroes III"s expansions build on the setting with more prominent character development, featuring new and old heroes from the series in differing roles.


title: Heroes of Might and Magic

text: The events preceding "Heroes IV" precipitated the destruction of the planet Enroth due to a clash between and the Sword of Frost. The ensuing destruction brings about portals leading to another world, Axeoth, through which many characters escape. "Heroes IV"s campaigns focus on the scattered survivors from Enroth and Antagarich as they form new kingdoms and alliances in the new world.


title: Heroes of Might and Magic

text: "Heroes of Might and Magic V" was the first "Might and Magic" title to take place on the previously unheard of world of Ashan, as part of Ubisoft's franchise-wide continuity reboot. Its six campaigns are each centered around a faction leader, tied together by the character of Isabel Greyhound, Queen of the Griffin Empire. The "Heroes V" expansion packs both continued this storyline, leading into the events of "Dark Messiah of Might and Magic". "Heroes VI" acts as a prequel, occurring 400 years prior.


title: Heroes of Might and Magic

text: Critical reception for the series has been generally positive, with GameRankings scores averaging from the high 70s to high 90s.


title: Heroes of Might and Magic

text: By October 1997, overall sales of the "Heroes of Might and Magic" series had surpassed 500,000 copies. This number had risen to 1.5 million copies by December 1999. The "Might and Magic" franchise as a whole, including the "Heroes" series, surpassed 4.5 million copies in sales by May 2001.


title: Heroes of Might and Magic

text: In 1999, "Next Generation" listed the "Heroes of Might and Magic" series as number 31 on their "Top 50 Games of All Time", commenting that, "With beautiful 2D characters and maps and absolutely brilliant strategy, "Heroes" managed to be a completely engrossing game that never once replaced quality design with new-fangled flash."


title: Caspar David Friedrich

text: Caspar David Friedrich (5 September 1774 – 7 May 1840) was a 19th-century German Romantic landscape painter, generally considered the most important German artist of his generation. He is best known for his mid-period allegorical landscapes, which typically feature contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies, morning mists, barren trees or Gothic ruins. His primary interest was the contemplation of nature, and his often symbolic and anti-classical work seeks to convey a subjective, emotional response to the natural world. Friedrich's paintings characteristically set a human presence in diminished perspective amid expansive landscapes, reducing the figures to a scale that, according to the art historian Christopher John Murray, directs "the viewer's gaze towards their metaphysical dimension".


title: Caspar David Friedrich

text: Friedrich was born in the town of Greifswald on the Baltic Sea in what was at the time Swedish Pomerania. He studied in Copenhagen until 1798, before settling in Dresden. He came of age during a period when, across Europe, a growing disillusionment with materialistic society was giving rise to a new appreciation of spirituality. This shift in ideals was often expressed through a reevaluation of the natural world, as artists such as Friedrich, J. M. W. Turner and John Constable sought to depict nature as a "divine creation, to be set against the artifice of human civilization".


title: Caspar David Friedrich

text: Friedrich's work brought him renown early in his career, and contemporaries such as the French sculptor David d'Angers spoke of him as a man who had discovered "the tragedy of landscape". Nevertheless, his work fell from favour during his later years, and he died in obscurity. As Germany moved towards modernisation in the late 19th century, a new sense of urgency characterised its art, and Friedrich's contemplative depictions of stillness came to be seen as the products of a bygone age. The early 20th century brought a renewed appreciation of his work, beginning in 1906 with an exhibition of thirty-two of his paintings in Berlin. By the 1920s his paintings had been discovered by the Expressionists, and in the 1930s and early 1940s Surrealists and Existentialists frequently drew ideas from his work. The rise of Nazism in the early 1930s again saw a resurgence in Friedrich's popularity, but this was followed by a sharp decline as his paintings were, by association with the Nazi movement, interpreted as having a nationalistic aspect. It was not until the late 1970s that Friedrich regained his reputation as an icon of the German Romantic movement and a painter of international importance.


title: Caspar David Friedrich

text: Caspar David Friedrich was born on 5 September 1774, in Greifswald, Swedish Pomerania, on the Baltic coast of Germany. The sixth of ten children, he was raised in the strict Lutheran creed of his father Adolf Gottlieb Friedrich, a candle-maker and soap boiler. Records of the family's financial circumstances are contradictory; while some sources indicate the children were privately tutored, others record that they were raised in relative poverty. He became familiar with death from an early age. His mother, Sophie, died in 1781 when he was seven. A year later, his sister Elisabeth died, and a second sister, Maria, succumbed to typhus in 1791. Arguably the greatest tragedy of his childhood happened in 1787 when his brother Johann Christoffer died: at the age of thirteen, Caspar David witnessed his younger brother fall through the ice of a frozen lake, and drown. Some accounts suggest that Johann Christoffer perished while trying to rescue Caspar David, who was also in danger on the ice.


title: Caspar David Friedrich

text: Friedrich began his formal study of art in 1790 as a private student of artist Johann Gottfried Quistorp at the University of Greifswald in his home city, at which the art department is now named "Caspar-David-Friedrich-Institut" in his honour. Quistorp took his students on outdoor drawing excursions; as a result, Friedrich was encouraged to sketch from life at an early age. Through Quistorp, Friedrich met and was subsequently influenced by the theologian Ludwig Gotthard Kosegarten, who taught that nature was a revelation of God. Quistorp introduced Friedrich to the work of the German 17th-century artist Adam Elsheimer, whose works often included religious subjects dominated by landscape, and nocturnal subjects. During this period he also studied literature and aesthetics with Swedish professor Thomas Thorild. Four years later Friedrich entered the prestigious Academy of Copenhagen, where he began his education by making copies of casts from antique sculptures before proceeding to drawing from life. Living in Copenhagen afforded the young painter access to the Royal Picture Gallery's collection of 17th-century Dutch landscape painting. At the Academy he studied under teachers such as Christian August Lorentzen and the landscape painter Jens Juel. These artists were inspired by the "Sturm und Drang" movement and represented a midpoint between the dramatic intensity and expressive manner of the budding Romantic aesthetic and the waning neo-classical ideal. Mood was paramount, and influence was drawn from such sources as the Icelandic legend of Edda, the poems of Ossian and Norse mythology.


title: Caspar David Friedrich

text: Friedrich settled permanently in Dresden in 1798. During this early period, he experimented in printmaking with etchings and designs for woodcuts which his furniture-maker brother cut. By 1804 he had produced 18 etchings and four woodcuts; they were apparently made in small numbers and only distributed to friends. Despite these forays into other media, he gravitated toward working primarily with ink, watercolour and sepias. With the exception of a few early pieces, such as "" (1797), he did not work extensively with oils until his reputation was more established. Landscapes were his preferred subject, inspired by frequent trips, beginning in 1801, to the Baltic coast, Bohemia, the Krkonoše and the Harz Mountains. Mostly based on the landscapes of northern Germany, his paintings depict woods, hills, harbors, morning mists and other light effects based on a close observation of nature. These works were modeled on sketches and studies of scenic spots, such as the cliffs on Rügen, the surroundings of Dresden and the river Elbe. He executed his studies almost exclusively in pencil, even providing topographical information, yet the subtle atmospheric effects characteristic of Friedrich's mid-period paintings were rendered from memory. These effects took their strength from the depiction of light, and of the illumination of sun and moon on clouds and water: optical phenomena peculiar to the Baltic coast that had never before been painted with such an emphasis.


title: Caspar David Friedrich

text: His reputation as an artist was established when he won a prize in 1805 at the Weimar competition organised by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. At the time, the Weimar competition tended to draw mediocre and now-forgotten artists presenting derivative mixtures of neo-classical and pseudo-Greek styles. The poor quality of the entries began to prove damaging to Goethe's reputation, so when Friedrich entered two sepia drawings—"Procession at Dawn" and "Fisher-Folk by the Sea"—the poet responded enthusiastically and wrote, "We must praise the artist's resourcefulness in this picture fairly. The drawing is well done, the procession is ingenious and appropriate ... his treatment combines a great deal of firmness, diligence and neatness ... the ingenious watercolour ... is also worthy of praise."


title: Caspar David Friedrich

text: Friedrich completed the first of his major paintings in 1808, at the age of 34. "Cross in the Mountains", today known as the "Tetschen Altar", is an altarpiece panel said to have been commissioned for a family chapel in Tetschen, Bohemia. The panel depicts a cross in profile at the top of a mountain, alone, and surrounded by pine trees. Controversially, for the first time in Christian art, an altarpiece had showcased a landscape. According to art historian Linda Siegel, Friedrich's design was the "logical climax of many earlier drawings of his which depicted a cross in nature's world."


title: Caspar David Friedrich

text: Although the altarpiece was generally coldly received, it was Friedrich's first painting to receive wide publicity. The artist's friends publicly defended the work, while art critic Basilius von Ramdohr published a long article challenging Friedrich's use of landscape in a religious context. He rejected the idea that landscape painting could convey explicit meaning, writing that it would be "a veritable presumption, if landscape painting were to sneak into the church and creep onto the altar". Friedrich responded with a programme describing his intentions in 1809, comparing the rays of the evening sun to the light of the Holy Father. This statement marked the only time Friedrich recorded a detailed interpretation of his own work, and the painting was among the few commissions the artist ever received.


title: Caspar David Friedrich

text: Following the purchase of two of his paintings by the Prussian Crown Prince, Friedrich was elected a member of the Berlin Academy in 1810. Yet in 1816, he sought to distance himself from Prussian authority and applied that June for Saxon citizenship. The move was not expected; the Saxon government was pro-French, while Friedrich's paintings were seen as generally patriotic and distinctly anti-French. Nevertheless, with the aid of his Dresden-based friend Graf Vitzthum von Eckstädt, Friedrich attained citizenship, and in 1818, membership in the Saxon Academy with a yearly dividend of 150 thalers. Although he had hoped to receive a full professorship, it was never awarded him as, according to the German Library of Information, "it was felt that his painting was too personal, his point of view too individual to serve as a fruitful example to students." Politics too may have played a role in stalling his career: Friedrich's decidedly Germanic subjects and costuming frequently clashed with the era's prevailing pro-French attitudes.


title: Caspar David Friedrich

text: On 21 January 1818, Friedrich married Caroline Bommer, the twenty-five-year-old daughter of a dyer from Dresden. The couple had three children, with their first, Emma, arriving in 1820. Physiologist and painter Carl Gustav Carus notes in his biographical essays that marriage did not impact significantly on either Friedrich's life or personality, yet his canvasses from this period, including "Chalk Cliffs on Rügen"—painted after his honeymoon—display a new sense of levity, while his palette is brighter and less austere. Human figures appear with increasing frequency in the paintings of this period, which Siegel interprets as a reflection that "the importance of human life, particularly his family, now occupies his thoughts more and more, and his friends, his wife, and his townspeople appear as frequent subjects in his art."


title: Caspar David Friedrich

text: Around this time, he found support from two sources in Russia. In 1820, the Grand Duke Nikolai Pavlovich, at the behest of his wife Alexandra Feodorovna, visited Friedrich's studio and returned to Saint Petersburg with a number of his paintings, an exchange that began a patronage that continued for many years. Not long thereafter, the poet Vasily Zhukovsky, tutor to the Grand Duke's son (later Tsar Alexander II), met Friedrich in 1821 and found in him a kindred spirit. For decades Zhukovsky helped Friedrich both by purchasing his work himself and by recommending his art to the royal family; his assistance toward the end of Friedrich's career proved invaluable to the ailing and impoverished artist. Zhukovsky remarked that his friend's paintings "please us by their precision, each of them awakening a memory in our mind."


title: Caspar David Friedrich

text: Friedrich was acquainted with Philipp Otto Runge, another leading German painter of the Romantic period. He was also a friend of Georg Friedrich Kersting, and painted him at work in his unadorned studio, and of the Norwegian painter Johan Christian Clausen Dahl (1788–1857). Dahl was close to Friedrich during the artist's final years, and he expressed dismay that to the art-buying public, Friedrich's pictures were only "curiosities". While the poet Zhukovsky appreciated Friedrich's psychological themes, Dahl praised the descriptive quality of Friedrich's landscapes, commenting that "artists and connoisseurs saw in Friedrich's art only a kind of mystic, because they themselves were only looking out for the mystic ... They did not see Friedrich's faithful and conscientious study of nature in everything he represented".


title: Caspar David Friedrich

text: During this period Friedrich frequently sketched memorial monuments and sculptures for mausoleums, reflecting his obsession with death and the afterlife; he even created designs for some of the funerary art in Dresden's cemeteries. Some of these works were lost in the fire that destroyed Munich's Glass Palace (1931) and later in the 1945 bombing of Dresden.


title: Caspar David Friedrich

text: Friedrich's reputation steadily declined over the final fifteen years of his life. As the ideals of early Romanticism passed from fashion, he came to be viewed as an eccentric and melancholy character, out of touch with the times. Gradually his patrons fell away. By 1820, he was living as a recluse and was described by friends as the "most solitary of the solitary". Towards the end of his life he lived in relative poverty. He became isolated and spent long periods of the day and night walking alone through woods and fields, often beginning his strolls before sunrise.


title: Caspar David Friedrich

text: In June 1835, Friedrich suffered his first stroke, which left him with minor limb paralysis and greatly reduced his ability to paint. As a result, he was unable to work in oil; instead he was limited to watercolour, sepia and reworking older compositions.


title: Caspar David Friedrich

text: Although his vision remained strong, he had lost the full strength of his hand. Yet he was able to produce a final 'black painting', "Seashore by Moonlight" (1835–36), described by Vaughan as the "darkest of all his shorelines, in which richness of tonality compensates for the lack of his former finesse".


title: Caspar David Friedrich

text: Symbols of death appeared in his other work from this period. Soon after his stroke, the Russian royal family purchased a number of his earlier works, and the proceeds allowed him to travel to Teplitz—in today's Czech Republic—to recover.


title: Caspar David Friedrich

text: During the mid-1830s, Friedrich began a series of portraits and he returned to observing himself in nature. As the art historian William Vaughan has observed, however, "He can see himself as a man greatly changed. He is no longer the upright, supportive figure that appeared in "Two Men Contemplating the Moon" in 1819. He is old and stiff ... he moves with a stoop".


title: Caspar David Friedrich

text: By 1838, he was capable only of working in a small format. He and his family were living in poverty and grew increasingly dependent for support on the charity of friends.


title: Caspar David Friedrich

text: Friedrich died in Dresden on 7 May 1840, and was buried in Dresden's Trinitatis-Friedhof (Trinity Cemetery) east of the city centre (the entrance to which he had painted some 15 years earlier). The simple flat gravestone lies north-west of the central roundel within the main avenue.


title: Caspar David Friedrich

text: By the time of his death, his reputation and fame were waning, and his passing was little noticed within the artistic community. His artwork had certainly been acknowledged during his lifetime, but not widely. While the close study of landscape and an emphasis on the spiritual elements of nature were commonplace in contemporary art, his work was too original and personal to be well understood. By 1838, his work no longer sold or received attention from critics; the Romantic movement had been moving away from the early idealism that the artist had helped found.


title: Caspar David Friedrich

text: After his death, Carl Gustav Carus wrote a series of articles which paid tribute to Friedrich's transformation of the conventions of landscape painting. However, Carus' articles placed Friedrich firmly in his time, and did not place the artist within a continuing tradition. Only one of his paintings had been reproduced as a print, and that was produced in very few copies.


title: Caspar David Friedrich

text: The visualisation and portrayal of landscape in an entirely new manner was Friedrich's key innovation. He sought not just to explore the blissful enjoyment of a beautiful view, as in the classic conception, but rather to examine an instant of sublimity, a reunion with the spiritual self through the contemplation of nature. Friedrich was instrumental in transforming landscape in art from a backdrop subordinated to human drama to a self-contained emotive subject. Friedrich's paintings commonly employed the "Rückenfigur"—a person seen from behind, contemplating the view. The viewer is encouraged to place himself in the position of the "Rückenfigur", by which means he experiences the sublime potential of nature, understanding that the scene is as perceived and idealised by a human. Friedrich created the notion of a landscape full of romantic feeling—"die romantische Stimmungslandschaft". His art details a wide range of geographical features, such as rock coasts, forests, and mountain scenes. He often used the landscape to express religious themes. During his time, most of the best-known paintings were viewed as expressions of a religious mysticism.


title: Caspar David Friedrich

text: Friedrich said, "The artist should paint not only what he sees before him, but also what he sees within him. If, however, he sees nothing within him, then he should also refrain from painting that which he sees before him. Otherwise, his pictures will be like those folding screens behind which one expects to find only the sick or the dead." Expansive skies, storms, mist, forests, ruins and crosses bearing witness to the presence of God are frequent elements in Friedrich's landscapes. Though death finds symbolic expression in boats that move away from shore—a Charon-like motif—and in the poplar tree, it is referenced more directly in paintings like "The Abbey in the Oakwood" (1808–10), in which monks carry a coffin past an open grave, toward a cross, and through the portal of a church in ruins.


title: Caspar David Friedrich

text: He was one of the first artists to portray winter landscapes in which the land is rendered as stark and dead. Friedrich's winter scenes are solemn and still—according to the art historian Hermann Beenken, Friedrich painted winter scenes in which "no man has yet set his foot. The theme of nearly all the older winter pictures had been less winter itself than life in winter. In the 16th and 17th centuries, it was thought impossible to leave out such motifs as the crowd of skaters, the wanderer... It was Friedrich who first felt the wholly detached and distinctive features of a natural life. Instead of many tones, he sought the one; and so, in his landscape, he subordinated the composite chord into one single basic note".


title: Caspar David Friedrich

text: Bare oak trees and tree stumps, such as those in "" (c. 1822), "Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon" (c. 1824), and "Willow Bush under a Setting Sun" (c. 1835), are recurring elements of Friedrich's paintings, symbolizing death. Countering the sense of despair are Friedrich's symbols for redemption: the cross and the clearing sky promise eternal life, and the slender moon suggests hope and the growing closeness of Christ. In his paintings of the sea, anchors often appear on the shore, also indicating a spiritual hope. German literature scholar Alice Kuzniar finds in Friedrich's painting a temporality—an evocation of the passage of time—that is rarely highlighted in the visual arts. For example, in "The Abbey in the Oakwood", the movement of the monks away from the open grave and toward the cross and the horizon imparts Friedrich's message that the final destination of man's life lies beyond the grave.


title: Caspar David Friedrich

text: With dawn and dusk constituting prominent themes of his landscapes, Friedrich's own later years were characterized by a growing pessimism. His work becomes darker, revealing a fearsome monumentality. "The Wreck of the Hope"—also known as "The Polar Sea" or "The Sea of Ice" (1823–24)—perhaps best summarizes Friedrich's ideas and aims at this point, though in such a radical way that the painting was not well received. Completed in 1824, it depicted a grim subject, a shipwreck in the Arctic Ocean; "the image he produced, with its grinding slabs of travertine-colored floe ice chewing up a wooden ship, goes beyond documentary into allegory: the frail bark of human aspiration crushed by the world's immense and glacial indifference."


title: Caspar David Friedrich

text: Friedrich's written commentary on aesthetics was limited to a collection of aphorisms set down in 1830, in which he explained the need for the artist to match natural observation with an introspective scrutiny of his own personality. His best-known remark advises the artist to "close your bodily eye so that you may see your picture first with the spiritual eye. Then bring to the light of day that which you have seen in the darkness so that it may react upon others from the outside inwards." He rejected the overreaching portrayals of nature in its "totality", as found in the work of contemporary painters like Adrian Ludwig Richter (1803–84) and Joseph Anton Koch (1768–1839).


title: Caspar David Friedrich

text: Both Friedrich's life and art have at times been perceived by some to have been marked with an overwhelming sense of loneliness. Art historians and some of his contemporaries attribute such interpretations to the losses suffered during his youth to the bleak outlook of his adulthood, while Friedrich's pale and withdrawn appearance helped reinforce the popular notion of the "taciturn man from the North".


title: Caspar David Friedrich

text: Friedrich suffered depressive episodes in 1799, 1803–1805, c.1813, in 1816 and between 1824 and 1826. There are noticeable thematic shifts in the works he produced during these episodes, which see the emergence of such motifs and symbols as vultures, owls, graveyards and ruins. From 1826 these motifs became a permanent feature of his output, while his use of color became more dark and muted. Carus wrote in 1929 that Friedrich "is surrounded by a thick, gloomy cloud of spiritual uncertainty", though the noted art historian and curator Hubertus Gassner disagrees with such notions, seeing in Friedrich's work a positive and life-affirming subtext inspired by Freemasonry and religion.


title: Caspar David Friedrich

text: Reflecting Friedrich's patriotism and resentment during the 1813 French occupation of the dominion of Pomerania, motifs from German folklore became increasingly prominent in his work. An anti-French German nationalist, Friedrich used motifs from his native landscape to celebrate Germanic culture, customs and mythology. He was impressed by the anti-Napoleonic poetry of Ernst Moritz Arndt and Theodor Körner, and the patriotic literature of Adam Müller and Heinrich von Kleist. Moved by the deaths of three friends killed in battle against France, as well as by Kleist's 1808 drama "Die Hermannsschlacht", Friedrich undertook a number of paintings in which he intended to convey political symbols solely by means of the landscape—a first in the history of art.


title: Caspar David Friedrich

text: In "" (1812), a dilapidated monument inscribed "Arminius" invokes the Germanic chieftain, a symbol of nationalism, while the four tombs of fallen heroes are slightly ajar, freeing their spirits for eternity. Two French soldiers appear as small figures before a cave, lower and deep in a grotto surrounded by rock, as if farther from heaven. A second political painting, "" (c. 1813), depicts a lost French soldier dwarfed by a dense forest, while on a tree stump a raven is perched—a prophet of doom, symbolizing the anticipated defeat of France.


title: Caspar David Friedrich

text: Alongside other Romantic painters, Friedrich helped position landscape painting as a major genre within Western art. Of his contemporaries, Friedrich's style most influenced the painting of Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857). Among later generations, Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901) was strongly influenced by his work, and the substantial presence of Friedrich's works in Russian collections influenced many Russian painters, in particular Arkhip Kuindzhi (c. 1842–1910) and Ivan Shishkin (1832–98). Friedrich's spirituality anticipated American painters such as Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847–1917), Ralph Blakelock (1847–1919), the painters of the Hudson River School and the New England Luminists.


title: Caspar David Friedrich

text: At the turn of the 20th century, Friedrich was rediscovered by the Norwegian art historian Andreas Aubert (1851–1913), whose writing initiated modern Friedrich scholarship, and by the Symbolist painters, who valued his visionary and allegorical landscapes. The Norwegian Symbolist Edvard Munch (1863–1944) would have seen Friedrich's work during a visit to Berlin in the 1880s. Munch's 1899 print "The Lonely Ones" echoes Friedrich's "Rückenfigur (back figure)", although in Munch's work the focus has shifted away from the broad landscape and toward the sense of dislocation between the two melancholy figures in the foreground.


title: Caspar David Friedrich

text: Friedrich's modern revival gained momentum in 1906, when thirty-two of his works were featured in an exhibition in Berlin of Romantic-era art. His landscapes exercised a strong influence on the work of German artist Max Ernst (1891–1976), and as a result other Surrealists came to view Friedrich as a precursor to their movement. In 1934, the Belgian painter René Magritte (1898–1967) paid tribute in his work "The Human Condition", which directly echoes motifs from Friedrich's art in its questioning of perception and the role of the viewer. A few years later, the Surrealist journal "Minotaure" featured Friedrich in a 1939 article by critic Marie Landsberger, thereby exposing his work to a far wider circle of artists. The influence of "The Wreck of Hope" (or "The Sea of Ice") is evident in the 1940–41 painting "Totes Meer" by Paul Nash (1889–1946), a fervent admirer of Ernst. Friedrich's work has been cited as an inspiration by other major 20th-century artists, including Mark Rothko (1903–1970), Gerhard Richter (b. 1932), Gotthard Graubner and Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945). Friedrich's Romantic paintings have also been singled out by writer Samuel Beckett (1906–89), who, standing before "Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon", said "This was the source of "Waiting for Godot", you know."


title: Caspar David Friedrich

text: In his 1961 article "The Abstract Sublime", originally published in "ARTnews", the art historian Robert Rosenblum drew comparisons between the Romantic landscape paintings of both Friedrich and Turner with the Abstract Expressionist paintings of Mark Rothko. Rosenblum specifically describes Friedrich's 1809 painting "The Monk by the Sea", Turner's "The Evening Star" and Rothko's 1954 "Light, Earth and Blue" as revealing affinities of vision and feeling. According to Rosenblum, "Rothko, like Friedrich and Turner, places us on the threshold of those shapeless infinities discussed by the aestheticians of the Sublime. The tiny monk in the Friedrich and the fisher in the Turner establish a poignant contrast between the infinite vastness of a pantheistic God and the infinite smallness of His creatures. In the abstract language of Rothko, such literal detail—a bridge of empathy between the real spectator and the presentation of a transcendental landscape—is no longer necessary; we ourselves are the monk before the sea, standing silently and contemplatively before these huge and soundless pictures as if we were looking at a sunset or a moonlit night."


title: Caspar David Friedrich

text: The contemporary artist Christiane Pooley gets inspired by Friedrich's work for her landscapes reinterpreting the history of Chile.


title: Caspar David Friedrich

text: Until 1890, and especially after his friends had died, Friedrich's work lay in near-oblivion for decades. Yet, by 1890, the symbolism in his work began to ring true with the artistic mood of the day, especially in central Europe. However, despite a renewed interest and an acknowledgment of his originality, his lack of regard for "painterly effect" and thinly rendered surfaces jarred with the theories of the time.


title: Caspar David Friedrich

text: During the 1930s, Friedrich's work was used in the promotion of Nazi ideology, which attempted to fit the Romantic artist within the nationalistic "Blut und Boden". It took decades for Friedrich's reputation to recover from this association with Nazism. His reliance on symbolism and the fact that his work fell outside the narrow definitions of modernism contributed to his fall from favour. In 1949, art historian Kenneth Clark wrote that Friedrich "worked in the frigid technique of his time, which could hardly inspire a school of modern painting", and suggested that the artist was trying to express in painting what is best left to poetry. Clark's dismissal of Friedrich reflected the damage the artist's reputation sustained during the late 1930s.


title: Caspar David Friedrich

text: Friedrich's reputation suffered further damage when his imagery was adopted by a number of Hollywood directors, such as Walt Disney, built on the work of such German cinema masters as Fritz Lang and F. W. Murnau, within the horror and fantasy genres. His rehabilitation was slow, but enhanced through the writings of such critics and scholars as Werner Hofmann, Helmut Börsch-Supan and Sigrid Hinz, who successfully rejected and rebutted the political associations ascribed to his work, and placed it within a purely art-historical context. By the 1970s, he was again being exhibited in major galleries across the world, as he found favour with a new generation of critics and art historians.


title: Caspar David Friedrich

text: Today, his international reputation is well established. He is a national icon in his native Germany, and highly regarded by art historians and art connoisseurs across the Western World. He is generally viewed as a figure of great psychological complexity, and according to Vaughan, "a believer who struggled with doubt, a celebrator of beauty haunted by darkness. In the end, he transcends interpretation, reaching across cultures through the compelling appeal of his imagery. He has truly emerged as a butterfly—hopefully one that will never again disappear from our sight".


title: Caspar David Friedrich

text: Friedrich was a prolific artist who produced more than 500 attributed works. In line with the Romantic ideals of his time, he intended his paintings to function as pure aesthetic statements, so he was cautious that the titles given to his work were not overly descriptive or evocative. It is likely that some of today's more literal titles, such as "The Stages of Life", were not given by the artist himself, but were instead adopted during one of the revivals of interest in Friedrich. Complications arise when dating Friedrich's work, in part because he often did not directly name or date his canvases. He kept a carefully detailed notebook on his output, however, which has been used by scholars to tie paintings to their completion dates.


title: Osborne House

text: Osborne House is a former royal residence in East Cowes, Isle of Wight, United Kingdom. The house was built between 1845 and 1851 for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert as a summer home and rural retreat. Albert designed the house himself, in the style of an Italian Renaissance palazzo. The builder was Thomas Cubitt, the London architect and builder whose company built the main facade of Buckingham Palace for the royal couple in 1847. An earlier smaller house on the site was demolished to make way for a new and far larger house, though the original entrance portico survives as the main gateway to the walled garden.


title: Osborne House

text: Queen Victoria died at Osborne House on 22 January 1901, aged 81. Following her death, King Edward VII, who had never liked Osborne, presented the house to the state on the day of his coronation, with the royal pavilion being retained as a private museum to Victoria. From 1903 to 1921, part of the estate around the stables was used as a junior officer training college for the Royal Navy, known as the Royal Naval College, Osborne. Another section of the house was used as a convalescent home for officers. In 1933, many of the temporary buildings at Osborne were demolished. In 1954, Queen Elizabeth II gave permission for the first floor rooms (the private apartments) in the royal pavilion to be opened to the public. In 1986, English Heritage assumed management of Osborne House. In 1989, the second floor of the house was also opened to the public.


title: Osborne House

text: The house is listed Grade I on the National Heritage List for England, and the landscaped park and gardens are listed Grade II* on the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens.


title: Osborne House

text: Queen Victoria and Prince Albert bought Osborne House on the Isle of Wight from Lady Isabella Blachford in October 1845. They wanted a home removed from the stresses of court life. Victoria had spent two holidays on the Isle of Wight as a young girl, when her mother, the Duchess of Kent, rented Norris Castle, the estate next door to Osborne. The setting of the three-storey Georgian house appealed to Victoria and Albert; in particular, the views of the Solent reminded Albert of the Bay of Naples in Italy. They soon realised that the house was too small for their needs and decided, with advisors, to replace the house with a new, larger residence.


title: Osborne House

text: The new Osborne House was built between 1845 and 1851 in the style of the Italian Renaissance, complete with two belvedere towers. Prince Albert designed the house himself in conjunction with Thomas Cubitt, the London architect and builder whose company also built the main facade of Buckingham Palace. The couple paid for much of the new house's furnishings by the sale of the Royal Pavilion at Brighton. The Prince Consort participated directly in the laying out of the estate, gardens and woodlands, to prove his knowledge of forestry and landscaping. At the more official royal residences, he had been overruled by the Commissioners of Woods and Forests, who had official responsibilities for the grounds. Below the gardens on Osborne Bay was a private beach, where the Queen kept her own private bathing machine. According to a news report, "The queen's bathing machine was unusually ornate, with a front veranda and curtains which would conceal her until she had entered the water. The interior had a changing room and a plumbed-in WC."


title: Osborne House

text: The house's original square wing was known as 'The Pavilion', containing the principal and royal apartments on the ground and first floors, respectively. The principal apartments, particularly, hold reminders of Victoria's dynastic links with the other European royal families. The Billiard Room holds a massive porcelain vase that was a gift of the Russian Tsar. The Billiard Room, Queen's Dining Room, and the Drawing Room on the ground floor all express grandeur.


title: Osborne House

text: In marked contrast is the more homely and unassuming décor of the royal apartments on the first floor. These include the Prince's Dressing Room, the Queen's Sitting Room, the Queen's Bedroom, and the children's nurseries. Intended for private, domestic use, these rooms were made as comfortable as possible. Both Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were determined to bring up their children in a natural and loving environment. They allowed the royal children to visit their parents' bedrooms frequently, at a time when children of aristocrats often lived at a remove from their parents in nurseries, joining them occasionally in public rooms, rather than in shared intimate spaces.


title: Osborne House

text: The main wing was added later: it contains the household accommodation and council and audience chambers, as well as a suite for Victoria's mother. The final addition to the house was a wing built between 1890 and 1891. This wing was designed by John Lockwood Kipling, father of the poet Rudyard Kipling. On the ground floor, it includes the famous Durbar Room, named after an anglicised version of the Hindi word "durbar," meaning court. The Durbar Room was built for state functions; it was decorated by Bhai Ram Singh in an elaborate and intricate style, and has a carpet from Agra. It now holds gifts Queen Victoria received on her Golden and Diamond jubilees. These include engraved silver and copper vases, Indian armour, and a model of an Indian palace. The first floor of the new wing was for the sole use of Princess Beatrice and her family. Beatrice was the Queen's youngest daughter, and she lived near Victoria during her life.


title: Osborne House

text: Osborne House expresses numerous associations with the British Raj and India, housing a collection of paintings of Indian persons and scenes, painted at Queen Victoria's request by Rudolf Swoboda. These include depictions of Indians resident or visiting Britain in the 19th century, and scenes painted in India when Swoboda traveled there to create such works.


title: Osborne House

text: The royal family stayed at Osborne for lengthy periods each year: in the spring for Victoria's birthday in May; in July and August when they celebrated Albert's birthday; and just before Christmas. In a break from the past, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert allowed photographers and painters to make works featuring their family in the grounds and in the house. This was partly for their own enjoyment and partly as a form of public relations, to demonstrate to the nation their character as a happy and devoted family. Many thousands of prints of the royal family were sold to the public, which led Victoria to remark, "no Sovereign was ever more loved than I am (I am bold enough to say)." Writing to her daughter Victoria in 1858 about the gloominess of Windsor Castle, Queen Victoria stated, "I long for our cheerful and unpalacelike rooms at Osborne."


title: Osborne House

text: The grounds also included a 'Swiss Cottage' for the royal children. The cottage was dismantled and brought piece by piece from Switzerland to Osborne where it was reassembled. There, the royal children were encouraged to garden. Each child was given a rectangular plot in which to grow fruit, vegetables and flowers. They sold their produce to their father. Prince Albert used this as a way to teach the basics of economics. The children also learned to cook in the Swiss Cottage, which was equipped with a fully functioning kitchen. Both parents saw this kind of education as a way of grounding their children in the activities of daily life shared by the people in the kingdom despite their royal status.


title: Osborne House

text: In 1859 Prince Albert designed a new and larger quadrangular stable block, which was built by Cubitts on the former cricket pitch. The building is listed Grade II* on the National Heritage List for England.


title: Osborne House

text: After Prince Albert died at Windsor Castle in December 1861, Queen Victoria continued to visit Osborne House because it was one of her favourite homes.