The Horse Fair

At a Paris horse market, powerful Percherons are led at a run by their handlers, rearing and kicking up dust, their muscles and movement rendered with vivid force. More than sixteen feet wide, the canvas is a spectacle of energy and motion. Rosa Bonheur was one of the most celebrated animal painters of the nineteenth century and among the few women artists of her time with an international reputation. To master her subject she sketched for about a year and a half at the horse market near the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, reportedly obtaining permission to wear men’s clothing so she could move freely in that male world. Shown at the Paris Salon of 1853, the painting was a triumph and toured Europe and America; it was later given to the Metropolitan Museum by the collector Cornelius Vanderbilt. It is both a masterpiece of animal painting and a testament to a woman artist overcoming the limits of her age.