Unveiled at the 1853 Paris Salon, Rosa Bonheur The horse fair It was an instant feeling. The large painting, over sixteen feet tall, toured internationally for two years; The image soon spread in smaller dyed and hard copies. Featuring nearly twenty horses and nearly forty grooms, merchants, and would-be buyers, the composition is brimming with an unbridled vitality scarcely contained in the disciplined public structure. Various subspecies make up the show, including the huge white-spotted percheron with knotted tails at right of center. Bonheur knew her subject well: although women were forbidden to enter the horse market on the Boulevard de l’Hôpital in Paris, she regularly dressed in male disguises to study the scene firsthand.
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Undeterred by obstacles to women with career ambitions, Bonor became the most famous animal of her time, increasing the cuteness to your genre of choice. She comes from a family of artists. Her father trained her not only in painting and sculpture but also in a free-thinking philosophy that fostered her independence. Like Bonheur herself, The horse fair Absolutely unconventional. It departs from the modern English pictorial treatment of horses as a prized possession of the gentry; Instead, Bonheur’s powerful beasts are designed to punish workers in the city. The image, powerfully heroic rather than calm, eschews Delacroix’s Orientalist tendency in favor of everyday reality.
And there is no trace of affection, which is a minor marvel given Bonor’s affinity with horse subjects. (Her sympathetic identification with horses was such that when she had to dress in women’s clothing, she described herself as “in the belt.”) Art historian James Saslow compiled evidence in 1991 to argue persuasively that the blue-robed character is riding a sorrel mountain near the center of the composition. , who looks directly at the viewer, is a self-portrait. Thus we find Bonor relinquishing the royal and military federations of chivalry, and proudly dedicating the genre to itself. Where was Baudelaire, one wonders, a poet of celebration for this very original painter of the landscape of modern life?
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