Rosa Bonheur

The most celebrated animal painter of the 19th century, famous across Europe and America for monumental canvases of horses, cattle, lions and stags rendered with a physical intensity and technical command that commanded instant respect. Rosa Bonheur was raised in an unusual household: her father Raymond Bonheur was a painter and Saint-Simonian utopian who believed in the equality of the sexes and educated all four of his children as artists. Rosa studied with him and in the Louvre, and exhibited at the Salon from the age of nineteen. Her working methods were as unconventional as her upbringing. To study horses, cattle and hogs with the intimacy she required, she obtained official police permits to wear trousers — a requirement under a Napoleonic-era law against cross-dressing, renewable every six months — so she could move freely through the abattoirs of Montfaucon, the horse markets of Poissy and the fields of Auvergne. The Horse Fair (1853), her magnum opus — a monumental canvas depicting the horse market on the Boulevard de l'Hôpital in Paris — toured Britain (where Queen Victoria asked to view it privately before the general public) and the United States, where it was eventually bought by Cornelius Vanderbilt and donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She won the Legion of Honour in 1865 — the first female artist to receive it — presented personally by the Empress Eugénie. She lived with her companion Nathalie Micas for forty years at the Château de By in Fontainebleau, keeping a private menagerie of horses, lions, deer, a yak and a bison. Her fame in America was enormous, sustained in part by P.T. Barnum's admiration and Buffalo Bill Cody's friendship; she painted his portrait in exchange for a private demonstration of his Wild West show.