Sport Show

Saint Lydwina of Holland, when a sickly virgin of 15, was persuaded in the winter of 1395 to rise from her sickbed and go skating upon the ice. No sooner had she ventured out on her runners than a rude young woman crashed into her, knocked her flat and broke her rib. "With unimaginable wailing of virgins," St. Lydwina was carried back to bed where she remained for the next 38 years in constant agony, relieved only by angelic visions.

Last week a woodcut of St. Lydwina on ice, probably the earliest skating print in existence, was a feature of an exhibition of sporting prints and paintings at Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum. If the Museum staff was only vaguely familiar with sporting art, this was not to its credit. Besides the skating woodcut, there were assembled a Rembrandt etching of a tired golfer, another skating scene by Rowlandson, etchings by Goya, five fine bronzes by Degas, a Hogarth cockfight, lithographs by George Wesley Bellows. A large proportion of the other sporting pictures were of horses, hounds and hunting. More than half were British, all were of a quality far superior to typical "sporting" art.

To avoid unnecessary rivalries, the Metropolitan's exhibition contained the work of no living artist, which led to one curious result: in all these pictures of a form of art which holds accuracy and fidelity to nature a chief essential, there was only one picture of a horse really galloping.

Until the invention of photography, the shrewdest observer of horses in motion was a self-taught British sporting painter named George Stubbs. For eight years he studied the anatomy of the horse, dissecting carcasses, hanging articulated skeletons from the ceiling to move the legs with ropes. His Anatomy of the Horse, published in 1766, is a landmark in veterinary medicine as well as in art. But in his pictures, many of which were in last week's show, his hunters still galloped in the traditional hobbyhorse attitude, with all four feet fully extended.

This inaccuracy in equestrian art persisted until 1872, when patriarchal Governor Leland Stanford of California, a famed horse breeder, bet two cronies $25,000 that there is a moment in each stride when a galloping horse has all four feet off the ground at once. It took him nine years and cost him $40,000 to win the bet. He hired a photographer, erratic, long-bearded Eadweard Muybridge, to take pictures of horses in motion at his Palo Alto stud farm. The first experiments were all failures. There followed an interlude while Photographer Muybridge was tried and acquitted under unwritten law for the murder of his wife's lover. Meanwhile Governor Stanford became impatient, hired a young engineer named John D. Isaacs who finally arranged a battery of cameras along a track, wired their shutters electrically so that they could be opened and closed in succession as a running horse went by. Using this device, by 1881 Muybridge had succeeded in making an accurate series of pictures of Occident, Governor Stanford's favorite horse, not only with four feet in the air at the gallop, but also in the little understood positions of trotting, cantering, approaching and jumping a fence.

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