PANORAMA OF SAN FRANCISCO, FROM CALIFORNIA ST. HILL

[San Francisco]: Morse's Gallery, 1877.. Albumen photographic panorama mounted on eleven panels, the entire panorama measuring a total of 7 1/2 x 87 1/4 inches. Caption title, photographic credit, and publisher's imprint printed on center panel. [with:] PANORAMA OF SAN FRANCISCO FROM CALIFORNIA-STREET HILL. KEY. San Francisco: Morse's Gallery, 1877. Albumen photograph, 7 3/4 x 10 1/2 inches, mounted on slightly larger printed card reading "Muybridge, Photo., Morse's Gallery. San Francisco" at the foot. PANORAMA: Each panel backed by cloth and tipped into original burgundy cloth portfolio, front board stamped in gilt. Cloth a bit rubbed and stained, worn at the edges, corners, and spine ends. The images themselves are very clean and bright. KEY: Some light soiling to the margins of the card mount, trimmed close along the right edge. Overall, the panorama and the key are in near fine condition. One of the landmarks of 19th-century American photography, and an iconic panoramic image of San Francisco, accompanied by the extraordinarily rare KEY to Muybridge's work. This remarkable panorama shows the dramatic growth of San Francisco nearly thirty years after the onset of the Gold Rush. In the 1870s, San Francisco audiences were hungry for panoramic displays, and the rest of the country was intrigued by San Francisco, the largest city in the West. Muybridge satisfied all appetites by providing a 360° view of the city, creating what Rebecca Solnit calls "an impossible sight, a vision of the city in all directions, a transformation of a circular space into a linear photograph." David Harris calls Muybridge's San Francisco panorama "one of the supreme conceptual and technical achievements in the history of architectural photography."

Eadweard Muybridge took the photographs that make up this panorama from a vantage point on the central tower of the unfinished Nob Hill residence of railroad baron Mark Hopkins, then the highest point in the developed portion of the city. The work was done in June or July, 1877 and took some five hours to complete, based on the shifting shadows seen in the image. Muybridge began in the late morning with a view toward the southwest (the tenth plate in the panorama) and proceeded in a clockwise direction, moving his camera away from the sun from one image to the next. Muybridge's view is from some 380 feet above sea level, and the view reaches some fifty miles into the distance and encompasses a width of fifteen miles. Despite the great scope of the work, precise details of the city are visible throughout, and one can clearly see hanging laundry, ships in the harbor, shop signs, and a clock on a tower in the fifth panel reading nearly five-thirty (other copies of the panorama show the clock reading one forty-five). San Francisco spreads throughout the panorama, and the dynamism of the city is clearly evident, as many unfinished buildings and roads under construction are also seen. Muybridge's panorama was advertised as being for sale in July 1877, offered for eight dollars rolled or ten dollars accordion- folded and bound, as in the present copy. Buyers could purchase the panorama directly from Muybridge, or through Morse's Gallery.

This copy of Muybridge's panorama is especially desirable, as it is accompanied by the exceedingly rare KEY to the image, produced about a month after the PANORAMA itself. The KEY is a very interesting piece of photography and promotion itself, essentially serving three purposes. First, it was used to promote the sale of Muybridge's magnificent eleven-part panorama, showing the entirety of the image and advertising that Muybridge was a "landscape, marine, architectural, and engineering photographer," an official photographer for the U.S. government, and a Grand Prize medalist at the Vienna Exhibition in 1873. It also advertises other photographic work available at Morse's Gallery, including images of California, Alaska, Mexico, and the Isthmus of Panama, as well as "horses photographed while running or trotting at full speed," a direct reference to Muybridge's pioneering work photographing horses in motion. Second, it is a detailed key to the panorama itself, identifying 221 locations numbered in the negative, corresponding to a key below the image of the city. Finally, it is a significant, separately-issued panoramic view of San Francisco in its own right.

David Harris notes:

"In addition to major geographical features like the Golden Gate and Angel Island, Muybridge identifies private residences, businesses, and institutions which by the late 1870s had, as much as the natural landscape itself, given the city its identifiable character. His list features religious and educational institutions, a range of the city's industries...major governmental and commercial structures, and the homes of some of the city's best-known and wealthiest residents. Where his camera angle allows clear views of entire rows of comfortable residences, as on Bush Street west of Jones, or Pine Street west of Mason, the photographer has included every homeowner's name in his annotations. The presences of these owners...suggests that Muybridge was as much concerned with marketing his images to interested residents as he was with producing a definitive listing of the city's elite."

The KEY is decidedly rarer than the PANORAMA itself. Aside from the present copy, Rare Book Hub reports only two other copies of the KEY and PANORAMA together at auction, at Sotheby's in 1979 and in the Streeter sale in 1968; and RBH records only a single copy of the PANORAMA and KEY together in the trade, offered by Charles Wood in 1987. So, to our knowledge, only four copies of the KEY and the PANORAMA have sold together over the last fifty-six years, as opposed to more than a dozen copies of the PANORAMA alone at auction and in the trade in that same time period.

Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) was one of the great photographic innovators of the 19th century. Born in England, he came to San Francisco in 1855 and built his reputation on photographs of San Francisco, Yosemite, and other western locales. The year after he produced his San Francisco panorama, Muybridge, at the behest of another railroad magnate, Leland Stanford, produced a sequence of photographs of a galloping horse that proved that all four of the animals hooves were off the ground at the same time. Muybridge's work in sequential photography, in which he photographed animals and humans in motion, laid the groundwork for moving pictures.

A remarkable view of San Francisco, and a high point in the photographic representation of the West, accompanied by the KEY to the image, rarely found together. David Harris, EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE AND THE PHOTOGRAPHIC PANORAMA OF SAN FRANCISCO, 1850- 1880, catalogue items 31 and 32; pp.37-53. Rebecca Solnit, RIVER OF SHADOWS: EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL WILD WEST. Paul A. Falconer, "Muybridge's Window to the Past: A Wet-Plate View of San Francisco" in CALIFORNIA HISTORY (Summer 1978), pp.130-57. HOWES M926, "b."