Eadweard Muybridge
Panorama of San Francisco from California St. Hill

CultureAmerican
Titles
  • Panorama of San Francisco from California St. Hill
Date1877
PlaceSan Francisco, California, United States
MediumAlbumen prints, mounted and joined on cloth and attached to front cover of cloth bound album
DimensionsSheet (average page/mount size): 12 1/8 × 8 3/16in. (30.8 × 20.8cm)
Other (photographs): 7 5/16 × 8 9/16 in. (18.6 × 21.7 cm)
Storage box: 5/8 × 12 5/8 × 9 in. (1.6 × 32.1 × 22.9 cm)
Credit LineThe Target Collection of American Photography, museum purchase funded by Target Stores
Object number80.35
Not on view

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Department
Photography
Object Type
Description

This is the first of two
panoramas of San Francisco photographed by English-born landscape photographer,
Eadweard Muybridge. Muybridge arrived in San Francisco from Europe in 1855; he
made his first panorama of the city in January 1877. Muybridge’s panorama was
available in two formats: as a set of albumen photographs mounted on cabinet
cards and as an album of 11 albumen photographs. This series of 11 photographs
assembled into a seamless panorama shows a 360-degree view of the city. The
long exposure time accurately captured buildings and ships in the bay, but not
the people moving below on the street. Muybridge’s analytic and systematic
vision was already taking form in these large-scale panoramas, an approach he
pursued as his career developed.




Provenance[The Witkin Gallery, Inc., New York]; purchased by MFAH, 1980.
Exhibition History"Past/Present: Photography from the Permanent Collection of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston," Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, December 8, 1991–February 9, 1992.

"Target Collection of American Photography: A Century in Pictures," Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, December 3, 2006–February 25, 2007; Austin Museum of Art, May 19–August 12, 2007.


Cataloguing data may change with further research.

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