# Sallie Gardner at a Gallop
> Eadweard Muybridge - 19 June 1878
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## Tombstone
- **Artist:** Eadweard Muybridge
- **Date:** 19 June 1878
- **Medium:** Sequence of wet-collodion glass-plate negatives, printed as albumen photographs mounted on card
- **Dimensions:** Not given in the Library of Congress catalog records consulted; see open questions
- **Object type:** Photograph
- **Period:** American, nineteenth century
- **Current location:** Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.
- **Attribution:** accepted
## Summary
On 19 June 1878, at Leland Stanford's Palo Alto Stock Farm, Eadweard Muybridge photographed the mare Sallie Gardner in full gallop with a battery of trip-wire cameras and captured, for the first time in a verifiable image, a moment when all four of her hooves were off the ground at once. The result settled a real dispute in equestrian science known as unsupported transit and ended a pictorial convention, the flying gallop, that had governed how horses were painted for centuries.The popular version of the story, that Stanford had a $25,000 bet riding on the answer, is not supported by any primary account from the period and is treated by the historians who have looked hardest at the record as legend. What is documented is a wealthy horse breeder's genuine scientific curiosity, a disputed share of engineering credit with a railroad engineer named John D. Isaacs, and a sequence of photographs that Muybridge went on to project, as hand-traced silhouettes on spinning glass discs, in a device that is one of the direct ancestors of the movie projector.The image most people know from magazines and textbooks, the woodcut engraving on the cover of Scientific American in October 1878, is not this photograph. It is a derived illustration. This record is about the photographic plates themselves, made at Palo Alto that June afternoon, now held by the Library of Congress.
## Provenance
Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it.
- **19 June 1878** Made for Leland Stanford at his Palo Alto Stock Farm; photographed and later copyrighted by Eadweard Muybridge `[documented]` (origin)
The session is independently dated 19 June 1878 by the Library of Congress's own catalog title for this item; some secondary accounts describe preparatory setup work in the days immediately before.
- **1878-1881** Eadweard Muybridge `[documented]` (publication)
Two frames were redrawn as a wood engraving for the cover of Scientific American, 19 October 1878, and the sequence circulated in France via La Nature that December. Muybridge later issued the Palo Alto sessions, including this one, within the portfolio The Attitudes of Animals in Motion, copyrighted 17 May 1881.
- **17 May 1881-unknown** Library of Congress, via copyright deposit `[documented]` (acquisition)
Copyright deposit is the documented mechanism by which Muybridge's Palo Alto photographs, registered under numbers 7176 and 7185 through 7393, entered the Library's holdings. The exact custodial path from that 1881 deposit to the specific print now catalogued as cph 3a45870, which the Library states is a digital file from a copy negative of "copy 2," is not established by the sources consulted.
- **unknown-present** Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division `[documented]` (current custody)
Held under reproduction number cph 3a45870.
## Open questions
- How many cameras were actually used on 19 June 1878: secondary sources give twelve for this specific session and twenty-four for the broader 1878 Palo Alto campaign, without a source resolving the discrepancy.
- What is the true exposure time achieved: the claimed one one-thousandth of a second is a period claim, not independently verified by contemporary instruments.
- Where are Muybridge's original 1878 glass-plate negatives now: the Library of Congress record examined for this entry is stated to derive from a copy negative of a copy print, not from an original plate.
- Has any published technical or conservation study examined the physical condition of the surviving Library of Congress prints: none was located for this record.
- Which specific copyright deposit item corresponds exactly to the plate now catalogued as cph 3a45870: the 1881 deposit covered the full Attitudes of Animals in Motion portfolio under a range of registration numbers, and this record has not traced the individual chain for this one plate.
## Sources
- [1] Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, catalog record for "The Horse in Motion. 'Sallie Gardner,' owned by Leland Stanford; running at a 1:40 gait over the Palo Alto track, 19th June 1878" (reproduction number cph 3a45870).
- [2] Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, catalog record for the companion diagram plate, "...2 frames showing diagram of foot movements."
- [3] Library of Congress, catalog record for "The attitudes of animals in motion...executed at Palo Alto, California, in 1878 and 1879," noting the copyright deposit stamps of 17 May 1881.
- [4] Wikipedia, "The Horse in Motion." Tertiary source; flagged for replacement with the Library of Congress catalog data and a peer-reviewed history of photography source.
- [5] Wikipedia, "Eadweard Muybridge." Tertiary source; flagged for replacement with a scholarly biography (e.g. Prodger or Solnit).
- [6] Wikipedia, "Zoopraxiscope." Tertiary source; flagged for replacement with a museum or archival technical description.
- [7] Smarthistory, "Eadweard Muybridge, The Horse in Motion."
- [8] Stanford Magazine, "The Man Who Stopped Time."
- [9] Science History Institute, "The Murderer Who Made Movies Possible." Note: this source frames the 1878 project as a "$25,000 project," a figure this record does not adopt given the wager itself is treated as apocryphal by the sources at notes 8 and 10; used here only for biographical material on the Larkyns killing and its chronological relation to the Stanford commission.
- [10] Allain Daigle, "Not a Betting Man: Stanford, Muybridge, and the Palo Alto Wager Myth," Film History: An International Journal, vol. 29 (2018), pp. 112-130.
- [11] IEEE Spectrum, "June 1878: Muybridge Photographs a Galloping Horse."
- [12] Wikimedia Commons, file and license metadata for the lead plate.
- [13] Wikimedia Commons, file and license metadata for the twelve-frame diagram plate.
- [14] Stanford Libraries, Eadweard Muybridge Collection Spotlight Exhibits, catalog entry for "The Attitudes of Animals in Motion."
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