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.

The Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand is in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

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 here, 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: Sallie Gardner at a Gallop.

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 trip wire 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.

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