WASHINGTON Eadweard Muybridge never meant to make pictures move. He just wanted to see if a galloping horse ever had all four feet off the ground at the same time.

The Phillips Collection's exhibition "Moving Pictures: American Art and Early Film" explores the connection between the first movies and the art of the era.

The exhaustive exhibit generally covers the first decade of the movies, from 1895 to 1905. It will be on display through May 20 at the museum, which is in the Dupont Circle area of Washington.

Samples of early short silent films are shown on television screens next to early film memorabilia, significant advancements that led to the development of motion pictures (such as Muybridge's sequential photographs of horses) and thematically similar paintings.

A 1901 Edison film showing a gondola trip along a faux Venetian canal at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, N.Y., is next to a 1909 John Singer Sargent oil painting of a real Venetian canal. A kinetoscope -- it moved, but it wasn't projected -- of a man flexing his muscles hangs next to anatomical studies of men's bodies, including more sketches by Sargent.

Because of technical limitations, the films of the late 1890s and early 1900s were short, from perhaps 30 seconds to as long as 10 minutes. To keep the audience entertained, the exhibitors would loop the film to show them several times in a row, according to signs accompanying the exhibit.

The early moving pictures thrived on movement -- it's what set them apart from paintings or still photography. Cameramen of the day set out to capture images of anything that moved even something as ordinary as a train pulling into a station enthralled audiences when it was projected on a screen.

Two movies in the exhibit are devoted to showing images of New York City in motion, from bustling streets and busy ports to the view from the front of a train crossing the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan. These films are paired with paintings by the likes of George Bellows and George Luks similarly showing the teeming city.

One 1899 clip by the American Mutoscope & Biograph Co. shows a snowstorm in New York. Beside it is a painting by Childe Hassam from around 1900, also showing a snowstorm in New York, and it is possible it is the same storm.

Few narrative films are included -- the earliest master of the form, Georges Méliès, is not even mentioned in the exhibit, which focuses mostly on filmmakers documenting what they saw around them. Even so, some of these earliest documentaries were staged for the camera, such as a boxing match or a 1893 kinetoscope of a trio of blacksmiths, which the exhibit says is the first moving image.

One room is devoted to images of oceans, crashing waves and the always impressive sight of Niagara Falls, in celluloid and oil. Movies and paintings were ways of bringing these dramatic scenes to people who might never see their glory in real life.

A hundred years ago, sex sold just as much as it does now, though in a tamer form. The 1896 Edison film "The May Irwin Kiss," somewhat scandalous in its time, showed Canadian comedian May Irwin and John C. Rice engaging in a comical kiss. It was the first kiss on screen in the movies.

That kiss is included in the exhibit, as is an even more salacious 1904 film portraying a windy day on a rooftop. Standing on a set in front of a painted backdrop of nearby roofs, a woman hangs up laundry on a blustery day. The wind kicks up her dress, allowing a laborer on the roof below to catch a glimpse of her well-turned ankle. When she realizes what he can see, she douses him in the face with a bucket of water.

That clip is paired with a 1915 John Sloan painting, from the collection of Randolph-Macon Woman's College, showing a woman hanging laundry on her roof on a cloudy day. The wind pushes the dress around her, forming an outline of her body.

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