¹ Advertising cards, 1878 and 1879, Box 3, Folder 4, Eadweard Muybridge Photograph Collection, PC 006, Stanford University Special Collections, Stanford, CA. The cards used a variety of diagrams to explain the motion studies.

² Johnson and Muybridge seem to have been acquainted as far back as 1862, when both men were mentioned in an article on San Franciscans in Paris. “Letter from Paris,” Daily Alta California, 3 Dec. 1862. The author thanks Marta Braun for this source.

³ Eadweard Muybridge, Kate and Robert Johnson Photograph Album, 1880, A.2.02, Clements Library, University of Michigan. The album includes 84 silver albumen prints. The dating of the album is based on the inscription “Illustrated by Helios 1880.” The author thanks Clayton Lewis of the Clements Library for help with identifying the provenance of this album. An alternative version of the album – located at the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco – dates both the Menlo Park and San Francisco sections to 1880, though this version also includes older photographs of the Johnsons' Sonoma County estate.

⁴ Prior to its inclusion in the 2010 Corcoran Gallery of Art exhibition, Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change, the album was mentioned only in the occasional article, including Cox, Robert, “The Transportation of American Spirits: Gender, Spirit Photography and American Culture, 1861–80,” Ephemera Journal, 7 (1994), 94–104, 102Google Scholar. The album is omitted from most previous literature on Muybridge, including Solnit, Rebecca, Rivers of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (New York: Penguin, 2003)Google Scholar; and Prodger, Phillip, Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

⁵ Eadweard Muybridge to David Starr Jordan, 11 Feb. 1892, Series IA, Box 3, Folder 24, David Starr Jordan Papers, Stanford University Special Collections, Stanford, CA.

⁶ Grier, Katherine C., Culture and Comfort: Parlor Making and Middle-Class Identity, 1850–1930 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1997)Google Scholar, 89.

⁷ For the domestic performance of cosmopolitanism in the Gilded Age see Hoganson, Kristin L., Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007)Google Scholar. At one point Muybridge worked in the “Cosmopolitan Gallery of Photographic Art.” Daily Alta California, 16 Feb. 1868.

⁸ “Diamonds of an Empress,” unidentified clipping, Kate Johnson Clippings Folder, Archdiocese of San Francisco Archives, St. Patrick's Seminary, Menlo Park, CA.

⁹ Lewis, Arnold, Turner, James, and McQuillin, Steven, The Opulent Interiors of the Gilded Age: All 203 Photographs from Artistic Houses (New York: Dover, 1987), 27–28Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Eadweard Muybridge, Stanford mansion, San Francisco, c.1877, Box 5, PC 006, Eadweard Muybridge Photograph Collection, Stanford Univesrity Special Collections, Stanford, CA.

¹¹ Carleton Watkins, “Views of Thurlow Lodge,” album, c.1873, MSS PHOTO 411, Stanford University Special Collections, Stanford, CA.

¹² Foucault reads Velázquez's 1656 painting as opening new possibilities of representation through its rupture of clean divisions between painter, object, and viewer. See Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1970)Google Scholar.

¹³ Leja, Michael, Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004)Google Scholar, 1.

¹⁴ The phrase “electro-photographic investigation of consecutive phases of animal movement” is included in promotional material for Muybridge's Animal Locomotion. See “Subscription Offer,” 1887, Box 62, Folder 5, Eadweard Muybridge Collection, University of Pennsylvania Archives, Philadelphia. See also Plate 365, Box OS 4, Folder 2, and Plate 406, Box OS 4, Folder 3, Animal Locomotion Study Collotypes and Publications, Eadweard Muybridge Collection, University of Pennsylvania Archives, Philadelphia.

¹⁵ Langley, Henry G., The San Francisco Directory for the Year commencing April 1879 (San Francisco, 1879)Google Scholar, 468, 820, 954. City directories from the 1860s and 1870s indicate that Robert Johnson had previously worked as an iron and steel importer in partnership with his father, George C. Johnson, a consul-general for Norway and Sweden.

¹⁶ Strazdes, Diana, “The Millionaire's Palace: Leland Stanford's Commission for Pottier & Stymus in San Francisco,” Winterthur Portfolio, 36 (Winter 2001), 213–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁷ Henry Anderson Lafler, “My Sixty Sleepless Hours: A Story of the San Francisco Earthquake,” McClure's Magazine, 27 (July 1906), 275–81, 279. Lafler notes the destruction of this district as well as the Stanford mansion in the earthquake and fire of 1906.

¹⁸ Strazdes, 239.

¹⁹ Five silver album prints depicting Buena Vista Winery (all created by Muybridge in 1871) appear in the version of the Johnson album held by the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

²⁰ MAP 203 (Map of the Leland Stanford Jr. University and Surroundings at Palo Alto, Cal, 1891), MAP 150 (Palo Alto Residence and Stock Farm of Leland Stanford, 1880), and MAP 011 (Villa Lands along the San Jose Rail Road between Redwood City and Mountain View, 1869), Stanford University Special Collections, Stanford, CA.

²¹ One of the few connecting threads between the two families can be found in an article, “Water for Stanford University,” Daily Alta California, 21 May 1890, on the transfer of the Johnson estate's San Francisquito Creek water rights to the Manzanita Water Company, which supplied water to the new university. However, this sale occurred after Robert Johnson's death in 1889.

²² Eadweard Muybridge to Etienne-Jules Marey, 17 July 1882, Muybridge Biographical File, California State Library, Sacramento (photocopy). Cited in Braun, Marta, Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey, 1830–1904 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992)Google Scholar, 231. See also Hendricks, Gordon, Eadweard Muybridge: The Father of the Motion Picture (New York: Dover, 1975)Google Scholar, 141.

²³ The Helios print matches a copy located at Stanford University Special Collections. The Stanford version is a working print that does not include the clouds, and its inscription states “Helios 1880” rather than “Illustrated by Helios 1880.” Muybridge Photograph Collection, 1869–1929, Box 3, Folder 8, PC006, Stanford University Special Collections, Stanford, CA. Note that several other images in the Clements Library album include clouds from older negatives.

²⁴ Muybridge was praised for his cloud photographs of the 1860s, though many writers knew him simply as “Helios.” One article lauded his ability to produce “cloud effects as we see in nature or oil-painting, but almost never in a photograph.” He is identified in the article as “an artist who conceals his real name under the signature of ‘Helios.’” Daily Alta California, 17 Feb. 1868.

²⁵ As Philip Brookman has noted, “By attaching this mythic symbolism to his photographs, Muybridge was metaphorically connecting his art to photography's source, its photochemical trigger.” Brookman, Philip, “Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change,” in Brookman, , ed., Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change (Washington, DC: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 2010), 23–110Google Scholar, 40.

²⁶ Hively, William, ed., Nine Classic California Photographers (Berkeley: Friends of the Bancroft Library, 1980)Google Scholar, 28.

²⁷ See, for example, “Patrons of Art,” San Francisco Call, 11 Nov. 1894; and “Bidding Was Lively,” San Francisco Call, 19 Dec. 1894.

²⁸ “Catalogue of the Art Collection of the Late Mrs. Kate Johnson, (Collected at a Cost of over 250,000 Dollars) Sold by Order of the Executors of Said Estate and Directors of the Mary's Help Hospital,” November 8–15, 1894, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; and “Catalogue of Personal Effects in the Residence of the Late Mrs. Kate Johnson, S. W. Corner O'Farrell and Leavenworth Sts., San Francisco, Sold by Order of the Executors of Said Estate,” 18–21 Dec. 1894, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

²⁹ “Mrs. R. C. Johnson's Noble Bequest,” San Francisco Call, 9 Dec. 1893.

³⁰ Citing an interview as one of its sources, an entry in a biographical index of California artists states that Kate Johnson “married wealthy Robert Johnson and settled in San Francisco about 1863. An amateur painter, she studied locally with William Keith. The Johnsons also built a lavish estate in Sonoma on the property now owned by the Buena Vista Winery. She died there of pneumonia on Dec. 2, 1893. Wm Keith was one of her pallbearers.” Hughes, Edan Milton, Artists in California, 1786–1940 (Sacramento, CA: Crocker Art Museum, 2002)Google Scholar, 591. Keith's status as a pallbearer is noted an unidentified newspaper clipping, “Grief Displayed: Funeral of Mrs. Robert C. Johnson This Morning,” in the Kate Johnson Clippings Folder, Archdiocese of San Francisco Archives, St. Patrick's Seminary, Menlo Park, CA.

³¹ Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. This album includes many more images than the Clements Library version (120 silver albumen prints as opposed to 84), including five older images of the Buena Vista Vineyards in Sonoma County. The album at the Clements Library seems to have been purchased in London and filled with prints. Its provenance is apparent from a small stamp with the words “Sold by Partridge & Cooper, 192 Fleet Street” on the inside cover of the album.

³² The album's spirit images are discussed in Braun, Marta, Eadweard Muybridge (London: Reaktion Books, 2010), 164–66Google Scholar.

³³ Haltunnen, Karen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1831–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 174–82Google Scholar.

³⁴ David Starr Jordan to H. C. Nash, 27 July 1901, Box 2, Folder 6, Leland Stanford Collection, SC512, Stanford University Special Collections, Stanford, CA.

³⁵ San Francisco Chronicle, 10 Nov. 1879. This day's paper was chosen at random, as nearly every issue of the Chronicle included such notices in the 1870s and 1880s.

³⁶ Twain, Mark, “The Spiritualist Séance,” in Twain, , Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, and Essays, 1852–1890 (New York: Library of America, 1992), 199–204Google Scholar, 200. Muybridge and the Johnsons attempted neither to pass the images as authentic nor to debunk the possibility of such a scene occurring in the future.  This would place them on the “ironic believers” side of Michael Saler's distinction between the “naïve” and “ironic” believers in various forms of “modern enchantment.” Saler, Michael, “‘Clap if You Believe in Sherlock Holmes’: Mass Culture and the Re-enchantment of Modernity, c.1890–c.1940,” Historical Journal, 46 (2003), 599–622CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁷ As historian Caroline Winterer puts it, “the sofa both meant something and did something, reflected and created fears and desires, enabled and discouraged certain postures and activities.” Winterer, Caroline, “Venus on the Sofa: Women, Neoclassicism, and the Early American Republic,” Modern Intellectual History, 2 (2005), 29–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 41. For a discussion of the racial valences of photographs of Gilded Age women on the fainting couch see Green, Rayna, “Rosebuds of the Plateau: Frank Matsura and the Fainting Couch Aesthetic,” in Lippard, Lucy, ed., Partial Recall (New York: The New Press, 1992), 47–54Google Scholar.

³⁸ For a listing of Kate Johnson's donations see Kate Johnson, last will and testament, Archdiocese of San Francisco Archives, St. Patrick's Seminary, Menlo Park, CA. One biographical sketch dates her conversion to 1878. Kate Johnson Subject File, Menlo Park Historical Association, Menlo Park, CA.

³⁹ The order of images in the Clements Library album differs from the alternate version at the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, suggesting that at least one of them cannot possibly match the sequence in which the photographs were created. Other clues include Kate Johnson's clothing, which changed from one image to another, and then back again.

⁴⁰ Although Muybridge's motion studies were far from scientific – particularly after 1883 when he turned to human subjects – they were “a treasure trove of figurative imagery as well as a compendium of social history and erotic fantasy.” Braun, Marta, “Muybridge's Scientific Fictions,” Studies in Visual Communication, 10 (Summer 1984), 2–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 15.

⁴¹ Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Howard, Richard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981)Google Scholar, 99.

⁴² Burgess, Gelett, The Heart Line (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1907)Google Scholar, 136. Discussing The Heart Line in his unpublished autobiography, Burgess wrote that the premises of spiritualism seemed “idiotic” to him. Gelett Burgess, “Escape from Reality – Autobiography,” n.d., Carton 3, Folder 2, Gelett Burgess Papers, MSS C-H 52, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, CA.

⁴³ Orvell, Miles, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989)Google Scholar, xv.

⁴⁴ An alternative version of the image is almost identical, but the camera has been shifted slightly to the left, revealing Kate Johnson in the mirror's reflection. Eadweard Muybridge, Kate and Robert Johnson Photograph Album, 1880, 2003.70.29, Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

⁴⁵ Muybridge's persona as an entertainer is described in Keller, Corey, “Magnificent Entertainment: The Spectacular Eadweard Muybridge,” Brookman, Philip, ed., Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change (Washington, DC: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 2010), 217–28Google Scholar, 217.

⁴⁶ “A Feline Family,” San Francisco Call, 31 Dec. 1893.

⁴⁷ “A Colony of Cats,” unidentified clipping, Kate Johnson Clippings Folder, Archdiocese of San Francisco Archives, St. Patrick's Seminary, Menlo Park, CA.

⁴⁸ “Mrs. Johnson's Gems,” San Francisco Chronicle, 7 Nov. 1894. When auctioned again over a century later, in 2002, Kahler's painting was described as “the largest cat painting in the world.” See Linda Shrieves, “Meow Mix,” Orlando Sentinel, 13 Sept. 2002.

⁴⁹ Robert Johnson's religious affiliations are unknown. He was active in the local Masonic lodge, however, and left 25,000 dollars in trust for the upkeep of his grave at the local Masonic cemetery, “where my father and mother are buried.” Last will and testament of Robert C. Johnson, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, CA.

⁵⁰ Last will and testament of Robert C. Johnson. A biographical sketch of Kate Johnson states that Rosalind was adopted at five years of age. Kate Johnson Subject File, Menlo Park Historical Association, Menlo Park, CA.

⁵¹ Daily Alta California, 3 Sept. 1890.

⁵² Krauss, Rosalind, “Photography's Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View,” Art Journal, 42 (Winter 1982), 311–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 314.

⁵³ Muybridge had created other self-portraits in the past, including one of himself reading a book in 1870 at San Francisco's Woodward's Gardens. Eadweard Muybridge, “Views in Woodward's Gardens,” Series 2, PIC 1971.055:560, Lone Mountain College Collection of Stereographs, the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, CA.

⁵⁴ Gunning, Tom, “Never Seen This Picture before: Muybridge in Multiplicity,” in Prodger, Phillip, Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 222–72Google Scholar, 224.

⁵⁵ Eadweard Muybridge, Plate 175, Box OS 21; Plate 259, Box OS 28; and Plate 288, Box OS 31, Animal Locomotion Study Collotypes and Publications, Eadweard Muybridge Collection, University of Pennsylvania Archives, Philadelphia.