Movement in art is the sense that a still picture is in motion, or the path that carries the eye across it. Painters build it with diagonals, curves that seem about to finish, blur, repeated shapes and figures caught off balance. The clearest case is The 1821 Derby at Epsom by Théodore Géricault, in the Louvre, where four racehorses charge toward the finish with every leg off the ground.
The horses are stretched to their full length, forelegs thrown forward and hind legs thrown back, and the whole canvas seems to rush toward the edge. Géricault made it for a horse dealer named John Elmore, who commissioned it. Until the 1870s, painters showed a galloping horse in exactly this way, and nobody found it strange.
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Yet no horse has ever moved like that. A galloping horse does leave the ground for an instant, but it does so when its legs are gathered under its body, never when they are flung out front and back. The pose that looked like speed to every painter of the age was a pose no animal can hold.
The mistake went unnoticed because a stride is far too quick for the eye. It was settled on June 19, 1878, on a racetrack in Palo Alto, California, at the order of a man who owned racehorses and wanted proof. He paid a photographer to catch the gallop one frame at a time, and the frames showed something the painters had never drawn.
That leaves the best known picture of movement in art resting on an anatomical error, and for decades it was the error that looked right. Not everyone accepted that the camera had the better of it. The sculptor Auguste Rodin held that the painters, not the photographs, were telling the truth.
Why does no horse gallop like Géricault's?
Because the pose was a habit of painters, not something anyone had measured…
What You'll Discover
Who paid to prove the painters wrong.
What Rodin thought of the photographs.
What Turner hid on the railway.
Why the Futurists broke a horse apart.