by Edward Ball
Judge Edwin Crocker, lawyer for the Central Pacific, limped through the door of the Nahl brothers’ gallery, leaning on a crutch. He was the fifth of the railroad “princes,” less rich than the others but still flush with stock and payouts and groaning under the weight of his houses and art collection. He used a crutch because in July 1869 he had suffered a stroke that paralyzed some of his right side, which caused him to withdraw from daily work at the train company. Despite his condition, Crocker still possessed his mind as well as his money, and now that he had extra time, he wanted to spend it on art.
Judge Edwin Crocker, brother of Charles and lawyer for the Central Pacific Railroad, by a San Francisco society painter, Steven William Shaw, 1873 (Illustration Credit 7.4)
The debilitated former judge looked a bit like his brother Charles—they both had wide faces, white hair, and long goatees—but Judge Crocker was considerably more polished than the crude, beery Charles, who was known to hike his feet onto tables and eat all of anything put out on a table. Judge Crocker professed an interest in “old California,” the pioneer state of just twenty years ago, and he had come to the Nahl brothers because they painted history scenes. He wanted them to paint a mythic scene from the gold mines.
Charles and Arthur Nahl made Judge Crocker a big painting, six by nine feet, called Sunday Morning in the Mines, a tableau of a miners’ camp in the Sierras from the rough glory years. The mining camps were cruel, dirty, violent places, remote little hells where men fought over gravel sluices that might contain flecks of gold. Sunday Morning in the Mines improves on them. The painting shows a village bathed in yellow light, with cabins and porches all around. In one corner, three drunks stagger together, in another two riders race their horses, and in a third, groggy miners argue and gamble. The scene, glossy and sentimental, is an idyll of rule and misrule, but with its vignettes of dejection and folly, the picture retains some bite, like a William Hogarth satire of rural life.5
Charles Nahl, Sunday Morning in the Mines, 1872. Oil on canvas, 6 × 9 feet (Illustration Credit 7.5)
Sunday Morning in the Mines became the best-known picture the Nahl brothers ever made, and it turned Judge Crocker into a regular customer. In two years he would commission six other pictures from the German-born history painters. Crocker returned to the gallery often enough to be recognized limping along Montgomery Street. There’s the railroad lawyer again, down from Sacramento and on his way to the showroom.
Edward Muybridge probably met Judge Crocker on one of the art collector’s visits to the Nahls, in 1870 or 1871. The photographer would have been hanging around the gallery to follow his sales, and for that matter to see his girlfriend, Flora Downs. There is no direct evidence, but what happened next makes this accidental meeting the likely thing. Like a good nouveau riche, Judge Crocker owned a mansion in Sacramento—his house was one of the most beautiful in that plain city—and outfitted it with an art gallery. In 1871 Judge Crocker hired Muybridge to photograph his house. Muybridge took the train from San Francisco to the capital, did the job, and returned to the coast to make his prints.
Among the Central Pacific associates, Mark Hopkins and Collis Huntington were friends, and the two brothers, Edwin and Charles Crocker, were friends with Stanford, who always put them on his guest lists, which were published in the papers. It seems that Stanford heard of Muybridge’s photos of Judge Crocker’s place and decided that he too, having doubled the size of his house, had to have a portfolio of his real estate.
And now Stanford and Muybridge meet.
Stanford said years later that he met Muybridge when his wife, Jenny, hired the photographer to document their house. It’s likely Judge Crocker introduced Muybridge to the Stanfords during one of the artist’s Sacramento trips, because in the spring of 1872 the Stanfords asked him to photograph their place, as he had just photographed the judge’s.6
In April that year, Muybridge made twenty-three pictures, inside and out, showing off the rooms and the exterior. Inside Muybridge posed Jenny Stanford and her sister, Anna Lathrop, who lived with the family, along with the little boy, Leland Jr. As always with the people in his pictures, they appear wooden, emotionless. He photographed the dining room, the aviary, and the library. He photographed the new grand staircase in wedding-cake stone that rose from the sidewalk to the front door. There is a faintly ridiculous photograph of Jenny Stanford playing billiards. And with this stock at-home-with assignment, the Stanford family acquired a personal photographer.
Jane Stanford aims a shot at the billiards table in her Sacramento house, with her sister, Anna Lathrop, looking on and her son, Leland Jr., in a blur at her elbow, photographed by Muybridge in 1872. (Illustration Credit 7.6)
Muybridge had done this kind of work before when he was first getting started in photography, over at his friend Silas Selleck’s studio, but he never liked the house-and-home trade. Now he had two supremely rich clients who wanted the same thing. As though to show his distaste, after finishing the job for Judge Crocker, Muybridge submitted an invoice for $700. The railroad lawyer thought this was exorbitant and refused to pay. Rather than fight about the money, Muybridge let it go and never collected his fee. This kind of behavior would be used against him during the murder trial, when witnesses said that his indifference to money could be taken as a sign of insanity.
As for Stanford, in the Central Pacific clique he had the reputation of being the most lavish with his money. Mark Hopkins and Collis Huntington were said to be misers: both lived in plain houses and dressed down, long after they could afford to live high. Stanford rarely questioned an invoice, and when he could, he always bought the most expensive thing available. Unlike Judge Crocker, Stanford paid Muybridge’s bill. He might have had more in mind for the photographer.
The two started to spend time together. Stanford was forty-eight, Muybridge forty-one. Both men were “old Californians”—Stanford had come west in 1852, Muybridge three years later. As the railroad was being finished, Muybridge had photographed the Central Pacific, and maybe he shared some of his stereo prints with the former governor. For his part, Stanford liked mechanisms of all kinds, as seen in his fetish for automatons, and he might have taken an interest in the gear of Muybridge’s so-called Flying Studio. Their friendship did not make the best sense: Muybridge was unkempt and on edge, a fast-talking man in boots in constant need of a haircut, while Stanford put forward the face of rectitude, grooming, and wordless restraint. But for whatever reason, the two men found a plane on which they could connect.
Stanford and his wife must have liked the photographs Muybridge made, which he put in an album with an embossed cover. The photographer had had enough clients to know how to push for the next assignment. By the way, was Governor Stanford not a lover of horses?
When Stanford looked to photograph his horses, he turned to the artist he knew. Muybridge said that his new client startled him when in 1872 he asked for photographs of Occident “taken while the horse was at full speed.” Muybridge said he was “perfectly amazed at the boldness and originality of the proposition” and that he did not think it was possible.
“At that date, the only attempts that had ever been made to photograph objects in motion had been made only in London and Paris,” Muybridge wrote, “only by the most conspicuous masters of the art. Occident was then admittedly the fastest trotter in the whole world. I therefore plainly told Mr. Stanford that such a thing had never been heard of—that photography had not yet arrived at such wonderful perfection as would enable it to depict a trotting horse.”7
Muybridge remembered Stanford’s answer. The lethargic and stubborn capitalist said, “I think if you give your attention to the subject, you will be able to do it, and I want you to try.”
At this, Muybridge remembered, “I had nothing to do but ‘try.’ ”
Later that spring, in May of 1872 at the Union Race Track in Sacramento, Muybridge took photographs of Occident that seemed to stop him in the middle of a fast trot, all his hooves off the ground, bu
t the pictures have not survived. We can speculate that Muybridge destroyed them years later, when he got better results. The only thing left of these first freeze-frame images is talk, on the one hand, and two artworks, on the other.
The Alta California newspaper ran the first report, describing a theatrical scene involving bedsheets and a cross-eyed camera.8
Stanford wanted Occident photographed pulling a sulky at full trot, some thirty-eight feet per second. Because wet-plate photography required generous light, Muybridge looked to increase the glare on the turf, and he asked for sheets. “All the sheets in the neighborhoods of the stable were procured to make a white ground to reflect the object,” said a reporter for the paper. Trouble arose when Occident balked at trotting over the bedclothes strewn around, but Stanford’s trainer, James Eoff, somehow persuaded the horse on the second or third try.
The racetrack at Sacramento where Muybridge began his motion studies of horses and made the first stop-motion pictures of Occident in 1872, before moving the experiments to Palo Alto (Illustration Credit 7.7)
At this stage of photography, there were no shutters, no f-stops, no exposure times. Taking a photograph meant removing the cap over the lens for a second or two and then replacing it. “The first experiment of opening and closing the camera on the first day left no result,” said the Alta California. “The second day, with increased velocity in opening and closing, a shadow was caught. On the third day, Mr. Muybridge, having studied the matter thoroughly, contrived to have two boards slip past each other by touching a spring and in so doing to leave an eighth of an inch opening for the five-hundredth part of a second, as the horse passed, and by an arrangement of double lenses, crossed, secured a negative that shows ‘Occident’ in full motion—a perfect likeness of the celebrated horse. The space of time was so small that the spokes of the sulky were caught as if they were not in motion.”
What Muybridge did was peculiar enough. He used a stereo camera, with two lenses, doubling the light that reached the negative, positioned like a pair of crossed eyes to focus on a center point. He then devised a handmade shutter, mounted in front of the lenses, consisting of two slats of wood pulled back on rubber bands and latched, cocked to slide across one another when Muybridge tripped the latch. These tricks, plus the trick of the sheets, produced the photograph Stanford wanted. Muybridge said that the pictures that resulted were “sufficiently sharp to give a recognizable silhouette portrait of the driver, and some of them exhibited the horse with all four of his feet clearly lifted … above the surface of the ground.” Still, the result was “shadowy and indistinct”—good enough to satisfy Stanford’s curiosity, but not good enough to print and distribute.
There were some other things going on. Ever since these first freeze-frame photos, the story of a bet has attached itself to Stanford and Muybridge. A film historian, Terry Ramsaye, and others have it that Stanford bet another horse owner about the unsupported-transit theory—the amount varies in the story from $10,000 to $25,000—Stanford having taken the position that horses do leave the ground. The bet might have happened, but I doubt it. Stanford had a disdain for gambling, and although he liked his horses to win, he developed the habit of giving away the purse. There’s no sign he put down money on his or anyone else’s animals. The idea that Muybridge was brought in to settle a bet appeared as a legend around a rumor, and the legend became famous.
Muybridge tried to freeze the horses’ movements at the Sacramento track during part of 1872, and he seems to have moved the experiment the following spring to San Francisco, apparently because the pictures weren’t good enough. Stanford had started boarding some of his horses on the coast at the Bay District Track, which had just been laid out on Geary Boulevard, near the Presidio. In San Francisco, Muybridge stopped springing his shutter by hand and devised instead a trigger attached to a thread that stretched across the track, so the horses at contact would trip the pictures themselves. He also acquired a young assistant, sixteen or seventeen years old, named Sherman Blake, who remembered some things about these first pictures.
“It was necessary to improvise a temporary dark room out at the Bay District Track, and we took along with us an express wagon, a heavy orange and red cloth tent, and an improvised ruby light containing a lit candle,” Blake said years later. “I carried six buckets of water into the dark room, and when the horse sprang the instantaneous shutter, by means of the thread across the track, Muybridge immediately took the plate holder from the camera, went into the dark room, and developed it.”9
The news reporter who wrote the first story had not been at either the Sacramento or San Francisco track to see Muybridge and his camera. Instead the photographer seems to have brought the pictures to editors’ offices and said what he had done, ten months later. A few days after the first report, the New York Times picked up the story—“A San Francisco photographer is declared to have obtained a perfect likeness of the horse Occident going at full speed.” The Atlanta Constitution ran the headline A WONDERFUL PHOTOGRAPHIC FEAT. Next a Paris photography journal ran a story, and ten thousand miles away, a newspaper in New Zealand ran its report. That a man who photographed a horse became a piece of national, and then international, news shows something of the widespread desire for the fleetness of photography, the craving for movement, for speed and acceleration in horses, railroads, emulsions.10
The pictures themselves, from 1872 and 1873, of Occident and another horse called Abe Edgington, have not survived. Nevertheless, a kind of secondary evidence of their existence remains. The popular printmaker Currier and Ives took an interest in Muybridge and Occident. Currier and Ives had one of their house artists, John Cameron, make a lithograph after one of the Muybridge photos. The color print, entitled The California Wonder Occident, Owned by Gov. L. Stanford, depicted the horse trotting left to right in the frame and flying above the ground. It went on sale in 1873.
In 1873 The California Wonder Occident, Owned by Gov. L. Stanford became a popular print by Currier & Ives, the purveyor of mass art for middle-class American living rooms. (Illustration Credit 7.8)
Thomas Kirby van Zandt, Goldsmith Maid Driven by Budd Doble, 1876 (Illustration Credit 7.9)
Stanford, too, wanted art to hang on his walls, but not photographs, and not lithographs. He hired an artist called Thomas Kirby van Zandt, who made a canvas that copied one of the Muybridge photographs. Van Zandt’s 1876 painting, Goldsmith Maid Driven by Budd Doble, this time showed the horse trotting right to left. The painting had all four hooves of the horse elevated above the track and the spokes of the sulky wheel frozen.11
And so we leave Stanford and Muybridge after their meeting and with their first collaboration, the freeze-frame photos of horses trotting, good enough to make but apparently not good enough to keep.
By the time van Zandt made his painting, four years had passed since the initial photographs. Why the delay? Maybe Muybridge never liked the results he had gotten. And maybe there was another reason for the delay. At the later date Muybridge was something of a household name in California. He was known for his pictures, but equally for his personal life. He was known for his revenge killing, a different kind of ecstatic moment.
HARRY LARKYNS
Let me refresh the facts about Harry Larkyns. They claimed he was a good-looking man with sandy hair, although no photographs survive that might prove it. One reporter wrote, “He is tall, sinewy and well built, of fine personal appearance, and graceful in manner and speech.” When he arrived in San Francisco for the first time, in fall 1872, Harry Larkyns spread the rumor that he was rich, and many believed him. He said he had schooling, probably true, to judge from his jobs as a writer and translator. He played cricket superbly, which people could see because soon after coming to town he captained a team, and when he didn’t play, he refereed. By the testimony of at least some of San Francisco’s women, he was said to be genteel, with stories and one-liners. Genteel men stood out, a memorable minority on the grasping frontier. Such characterizations of
the man called Harry Larkyns come from newswriters, who enjoyed him, counted him one of theirs, and followed him to the end.
His residence in California did not begin well, however. In March 1873, a reporter went to the city jail to interview Larkyns, who had left San Francisco briefly, returned to town, and been arrested. Behind bars, the San Francisco Chronicle reported, “He was dressed in the height of fashion having on a nobby suit of clothes and an English hat with a peacock feather.”1 The prisoner in the peacock hat said he was Scottish but also expatriated from England.
The name “Larkins” is common in Ireland, less so in Scotland, but “Larkyns” seems to have been an invention. Like Edward Muybridge, he had probably tinkered with his name. Was he the man called Harry Larkin who arrived in New York from Ireland in May 1859, at age eighteen, aboard the steamship Emerald Isle? (That Harry traveled in steerage.) Or was he the immigrant recorded as “Mr. Larkins” who docked in New York in April 1864, age twenty-six, having come from England via Havana, on the Corsica? (A Larkins who had his own cabin on that voyage.) Or was he the Henry Larkins cited in customs records for July 1865, a twenty-five-year-old Irishman who came to New York aboard the steamer Constantine?2 Many years distant, no one can say, and even in California’s early days such questions were moot.