Emptying a Bucket of Water (1887): Art, History and Details

Emptying a Bucket of Water (1887) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Eadweard J. Muybridge (American, 1830–1904).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Eadweard J. Muybridge initially used horses to capture motion as separate slices of time faster than the human eye could perceive them, then moved on to study other animal and human movements. Everyday activities, like emptying a bucket of water, were broken down and sequenced back-to-back. This series was commissioned by the University of Pennsylvania and intended to diagnose dysfunction in human movement by allowing each consecutive action to be studied in isolation. The university’s desire for distribution called for the use of collotype. The process had been recently improved to the point where editions of up to 1,000 were possible, making it an attractive option for publishers.

Object facts

• Title: Emptying a Bucket of Water
• Date: 1887
• Creator attribution: Eadweard J. Muybridge (American, 1830–1904)
• Culture: America
• Type: Photograph
• Technique: collotype
• Dimensions: Image: 22.5 x 34 cm (8 7/8 x 13 3/8 in.); Paper: 47.4 x 60.4 cm (18 11/16 x 23 3/4 in.); Matted: 50.8 x 61 cm (20 x 24 in.)
• Collection: PH - American 19th Century
• Department: Photography
• Accession number: 1992.220

Collection credit

Gift of Laurence Miller Gallery, New York, in honor of Evan H. Turner

Further reading listed by the museum

• Muybridge, Eadweard. Muybridge's Complete Human and Animal Locomotion: All 781 Plates from the 1887 Animal Locomotion by Eadweard Muybridge. 1979.
• Turner, Evan H. “The Year in Review for 1992.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 80, no. 2 (February 1993): 38–79.
• "1992 Annual Report." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 80, no. 6 (1993): 215-295.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.