The Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand

The Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand (originally titled A May Morning in the Park) is an 1879-80 painting by Thomas Eakins. It shows Fairman Rogers driving a coaching party in his four-in-hand carriage through Philadelphia's Fairmount Park. It is thought to be the first painting to examine precisely, through systematic photographic analysis, how horses move. Eakins taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where Rogers was a Board member and chairman of the Committee on Instruction. Rogers recruited Eakins back to the Academy in 1878 and commissioned the painting from his new instructor. Independently wealthy, Rogers was a civil engineer and retired professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He was an avid coaching enthusiast, founder of the Philadelphia Coaching Club and author of the still-definitive guide to the sport: A Manual of Coaching (Philadelphia: 1900). In the painting, Eakins combined Rogers's love of science with his love of coaching. Both Rogers and Eakins admired and followed Eadweard Muybridge's ground-breaking work in photographing the movement of horses in motion. In 1877, Muybridge published an instantaneous photograph of the racehorse "Occident", showing for the first time just when all four hooves of a galloping horse left the ground. It was commonly taken for granted that the horse has a period of suspension in the gallop, but, as illustrated on the right, they thought it was in the extended phase of the stride. Muybridge demonstrated that it was in the contracted phase. The following year he conducted an experiment that became one of the seminal events in the history of motion pictures: The Horse in Motion. On June 19, 1878, at a racetrack in Palo Alto, California, Muybridge positioned a row of 24 cameras set close together at regular intervals, each with a tripwire crossing the track. When the racehorse "Sallie Gardner" galloped past the cameras she tripped the wires, resulting in a short but regular sequence of instantaneous photographs shot close to 1/25 of a second apart. Eakins studied Muybridge's published photographs and taught the new discoveries to his students at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. According to Eakins biographer Gordon Hendricks, seven years before Sallie Gardner was published, Rogers had attempted to photograph his own horses in motion using a camera with a shutter that rapidly opened and closed (like a Venetian blind). In 1879, Muybridge invited Rogers to witness his further experiments in California — a 7-day train ride from Philadelphia — but Rogers chose to spend the summer in Newport, Rhode Island. Under Rogers's sponsorship, Muybridge later moved to Philadelphia and continued his experiments at the University of Pennsylvania. Rogers paid Eakins $500 for the painting, and exhibited it at the Philadelphia Society of Artists in November 1880. The reviews were respectful, but generally unfavorable, noting the inconsistency between the hooves and spokes, and using this point as a springboard to lecture about the superiority of Art over Science. Eakins was trying something new and while some understood and appreciated the attempt, when first exhibited the painting was not regarded as successful. According to Hilton Kramer (1985), "...The Fairman Rogers For-In-Hand is a surpassingly dull painting... The painting lacks what for Eakins was always the essential element in art: moral imperative. Representational accuracy, "scientific" or otherwise, was a necessary co-efficient of this moral imperative in art, but it was not itself a sufficient basis for it."