The Horse Fair

To paint this, Rosa Bonheur spent a year and a half at the horse market on the Boulevard de l'Hôpital in Paris, sketching twice a week, and she went dressed as a man so the dealers and grooms would leave her alone. Trousers on a woman needed a police permit in 1850s Paris, and she held one. What she brought back is a wall of muscle and motion, big Percheron horses wheeling and rearing as they are led to sale, which she herself compared to the horsemen of the Parthenon frieze. When it appeared at the Paris Salon of 1853 it was a sensation, and one critic wrote that he felt he had to jump out of the horses' way. It made Bonheur the most celebrated animal painter in Europe. The asylum of the Salpêtrière stands in the trees at the left.