Above: Stereoviewer card of the Plaza, World’s Fair, St. Louis. From the series “World Tours of Original Views” produced by Pettijohn. Other series include United States, Japan, St. Louis Exposition and Russia.
YPM catalog no. 36.5

Below: ACME transparent watercolor paints for photo-portrait coloring. Made in Chicago.
YPM catalog no. 30.17B

Like drawings, photographs could be hand-colored and transferred onto glass plates. “Magic lanterns,” devices developed almost two centuries earlier, used these plates to project images onto a screen. Magic lantern shows were extremely popular in both the home and theater.

Above: Brewster-type stereoviewer made by Richard & Joseph Beck, England. Middle to late 19th century.
YPM catalog no. 30.13

Middle: Stereoviewer card titled “Paradise.” Hand-painted detail of a man seated among five women. Maker unknown.
YPM catalog no. 36.11

Below: Holmes-type stereoviewer with cardholder. Stereoviewer made by Underwood & Underwood, New York. Retractable handle made by Pat’s Manufacturers, dated June 4, 1881. Metal viewer with velvet lining.
YPM catalog nos. 30.10, 30.12

A stereoviewer gives the illusion of three dimensions by allowing two images (taken at a slightly different angles) to be viewed simultaneously.

Stereoviewer cards often featured exotic scenery, artwork and famous events, but family photographs and portraits were also adapted to this format. Stereoviewers varied in mechanical sophistication and decoration; some were designed to be hand-held with interchangeable cards while other models stored the cards internally on a rotating cylinder.

This image is from a sequence from Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic studies of motion in the late 1800s shows “Daisy” jumping a hurdle.

One popular zoetrope subject was that of a running horse in which each frame captures one moment of the horse’s stride. Zoetropes can be mounted horizontally or vertically and some even featured a lens so that the images could be projected onto a screen.

The introduction of motion film in the late 19th century provided Victorian audiences with smoother and longer continuous visual performances. Predictably, the art of the magic lantern eventually became obsolete in the face of this new technology. Zoetropes and stereoviewers, however, remain common toys today.

From Muybridge’s Animals in Motion, Dover Publications, 2007. Images from Animal Locomotion: An Electrophotographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements, 1887, originally published by Eadweard Muybridge under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.