Rosa Bonheur

To paint horses properly, Rosa Bonheur needed to stand around in places no respectable Frenchwoman was supposed to be — the Paris horse market, the slaughterhouses, the open country. So in the 1850s she applied to the Paris police for a permit to wear trousers, becoming one of only a handful of women in France legally allowed to dress as a man, and she renewed it for years.

The work it let her make was The Horse Fair, finished in 1855, a huge canvas of dealers wrestling heavy Percheron horses down a Paris boulevard. She had spent over a year at the market twice a week, sketching, sometimes in her men's clothes to go unbothered. Shown at the Salon, then toured through Britain and the United States, it made her an international celebrity while she was still in her thirties.

Bonheur was raised among the Saint-Simonians, an early socialist movement that believed in educating women as equals, and she lived openly for decades with her companion Nathalie Micas at a château near Fontainebleau, surrounded by the animals she kept as models, lions included. In 1865 the Empress Eugénie made her the first woman to receive the Legion of Honour, France's national order of merit. She died at that château in 1899.