Free Rein: Bonheur, Degas, and Painting Horses
In "The Horse Fair" and "At the Races," both Rosa Bonheur and Edgar Degas found beauty in a familiar subject.
The Horse Fair demands your attention when you walk into the room.
Housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the painting occupies an entire wall. Visitors stop in their tracks, compelled by some magic to take in the jostling horses and their intrepid riders.
Of course, everyone is there to see the Impressionists—the artists who, two decades after The Horse Fair was painted, would shock the Parisian public. The gallery rooms for early nineteenth-century art remain less busy than those that house Claude Monet’s water lilies or Edgar Degas’s ballerinas.
But viewers linger by The Horse Fair. The painting’s dynamism, its sense of movement, the musculature of the riders and the extraordinary precision of the horses—it is a painting full of theatricality. Storm clouds gather overhead. The wind sweeps through the horses’ manes. In the mid-nineteenth century, a painting of such size and grandeur (measuring at roughly 17 feet wide by 8 feet tall) would usually be reserved for a historical or mythological scene, something deemed “important” by the Salon des Beaux-Arts. Animal paintings could certainly make it into the Salon’s coveted halls, but they occupied a lower place in the judges’ hierarchy.
However, when The Horse Fair debuted in 1853, it received widespread praise. Its painter was a woman: Rosa Bonheur.
Marie-Rosalie Bonheur was one of the most celebrated painters of the Realism movement, an artistic style pioneered in France during the mid-1800s. Realists sought to portray ordinary life as it was; subjects often included working-class professions and rural communities, rendered without a glamorous sheen. Bonheur herself came from a family of artists, and after she left an unsuccessful apprenticeship with a seamstress, her father decided to indulge her love of drawing and train her as an artist himself.
Because she was a girl, the young Rosa could not study at the École des Beaux-Arts or an affiliated studio, and she was certainly not allowed to partake in live drawing sessions of nude models. This obstacle did not deter her—instead, she learned by copying the Old Masters at the Louvre, and she painted studies of animals at farms on the outskirts of Paris. She also dissected animals at the National Veterinary Institute and studied the anatomy of livestock in Paris’s slaughterhouses. Her meticulous research helped her to paint animals with great care and, yes, Realism. Bonheur became known for her animal paintings, winning her many influential admirers from Empress Eugénie to Eugène Delacroix. In 1865, Bonheur was the first woman to be awarded the Légion d’Honneur for achievement in the arts.
She was among the most successful painters of her time. Her earnings allowed her to purchase the Château de By, where she lived with her (likely romantic) partner Nathalie Micas for over forty years until Micas’s passing. Bonheur lived until 1899, long enough to see new movements such as Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and Neo-Impressionism change the artistic landscape of her country.
And then, as with many female artists, art historians of the twentieth century largely wrote her out of the history books. Only in recent decades has her reputation been revitalized, partially thanks to the 2018 opening of the Musée de l’atelier Rosa Bonheur in the Château de By.
The Horse Fair arrived at the Met in 1887, after Cornelius Vanderbilt II purchased the painting for $53,000 (nearly $1.8 million today) and donated it to the museum. Bonheur referred to the painting as her own Parthenon frieze, and having seen it in person, I can understand the comparison. Aside from the rectangular composition mirroring that of the cavalry scene from the frieze, what Bonheur achieves in The Horse Fair is the elevation of an “ordinary” profession for the time—selling horses—with the gravitas of any historical scene. Especially when compared to her other works that sit more neatly in the Realist camp (such as Ploughing in the Nivernais, above), The Horse Fair possesses a Romantic edge: the energy and excitement of Delacroix’s Lion Hunt series paired with Realist subject matter.
I was reminded of The Horse Fair this week after reading
’s recent article, “Edgar Degas - At the races” in Art Every Day. Though Degas will always be best known for his ballerinas, he was also particularly interested in race horses and jockeys, and he painted many scenes from races throughout his career. In fact, the races represented Degas’s first departure from history painting and an opportunity to depict scenes from modern life, which would become a key feature of Impressionism.While Bonheur’s horses are imposing and grand, Degas’s race scenes capture fleeting, familiar moments. Especially in Degas’s earlier works (see above), one can see the impact of the Realism movement on what would become known as Impressionism. Even as his style evolved, his horses appear more approachable than Bonheur’s, despite the fact that they are less true to life.
Impressionism and the modern movements that sprung from it marked the death of Realism, whose artists to this day garner lower auction prices than the Impressionists. (It is a bit ironic when one considers the history of Impressionism, and how the artists began very much as outsiders.) Yet as we can see through Bonheur and Degas’s horses, much of the radical subject matter that the Impressionists adopted, from rural laborers to urban scenes, came first from the Realists. Artists like Bonheur planted the seed of a potent idea: that in the lives of those around them, an artist could find action, anticipation, and drama to rival any Greek myth.
Another really brilliant article, Nicole. I love how you make this connection with Bonheur and Degas. But your mention of Delacroix's work and her romanticism edge is a brilliant branch of this too. I was lucky enough to see a portrait of a lion by her in a recent show, and the Delacroix influence in that is even more overt.
Also, I'm sure you know this anyway, but one other thing I absolutely love about the horse fair is that she disguises a self portrait in it too as apparently the organisers of the horse fair once refused her access to paint there in person due it being a male only space.
So in essence, it was her way of giving a bit of push back to the authorities of her time. And again, that strikes me as the kind of thing only a real romantic hero would do!
Great post! I read in Wikipedia, to which I resorted after getting a taste of Bonheur from your post, that she sought and received governmental permission to wear men's clothing!?! I'm glad I don't need anyone's permission when I consult my closet in the morning.