Two Horses

In May 1889 Buffalo Bill's Wild West set up camp at Neuilly, on the edge of Paris, for the run of the Exposition Universelle, the world's fair that left the city its Eiffel Tower. Rosa Bonheur, then 67 and the best-known animal painter in Europe, was let in among the tents. She spent days there at her easel and painted William Cody on horseback, a picture the show went on to use for its posters.

This canvas of two horses is dated to about the same year. By then she kept mustangs at her own house near the forest of Fontainebleau, sent over by an American breeder who admired her work, so the animals of that Paris summer were nothing new to her. The painting reached Athens as a gift from Michael Salvagos, a Greek cotton merchant in Alexandria, and his wife Argini Benaki.