the hind legs simultaneously in so
completely horizontal a position as they are made to take in the
Mycenaean gold-work and the modern "racing plates."

How, then, we may now ask, ought an artist to represent a galloping
horse? Some critics say that he ought not to represent anything in
such rapid action at all. But, putting that opinion aside, it is an
interesting question as to what a painter should depict on his canvas
in order to convey to others who look at it the state of mind, of
impression, feeling, emotion, judgment, which a live, galloping horse
produces in him. The scientific draughtsman would, of course, present
to us a series of drawings exactly like the instantaneous photographs,
his object being to show what "is," and not what the artist aims at,
namely, what "appears," "seems," or (without pondering and analysis)
"is thought to be." The painter, in his quality of artist, would be
wrong to select any one of the dozen or more poses of the galloping
horse published by Muybridge, each limited to the fortieth of a
second, since no human eye can fix (as the photographic camera can)
separate pictures following one another at the rate of twenty a
second, each enduring one fortieth of a second, and each separated by
an interval of a fortieth of a second from the next. All the phases
which occur in any one-tenth of a second (only two, or possibly three
of the Muybridge series shown in Pl. I) are, as it were, fused in our
visual impression, because each picture lasts on the retina of the eye
for one-tenth of a second, or (to put it more accurately) because the
"impression" or condition of the retina produced by each picture
persists or endures for the tenth of a second.

It may, perhaps, be suggested (and, indeed, has been), that it is the
"blurred" or "fused" picture produced by the successive poses of the
galloping horse's legs in one-tenth of a second that the painter ought
to imitate on his canvas. In support of this notion we have the fact
that the rapidly running wheels of a coach or of a gun-carriage (as in
the pictures by Wouwerman) are represented by artists, not with the
twelve or fourteen spokes which we know to be there--and would be
photographed as separate things in an exposure of the fortieth of a
second--but as a blurred haze of some fifty or more indistinct
"spokes." In this case it undoubtedly results that the observer of the
picture is satisfied and receives the mental impression or illusion of