Just off the second floor entrance to the Museum of Metropolitan Art's magnificent collection of Nineteenth Century European Painting and Sculpture in New York is a corridor that leads to the B. Gerald Cantor Sculpture Gallery. Hanging on the wall on the left-hand side of the well-lit corridor is a mammoth oil canvas approximately 8 x 16 feet titled The Horse Fair. The painting is dated 1853-55 and signed by the French animal painter Rosa Bonheur, a remarkable woman and the most famous female artist of the nineteenth century.

The Horse Fair shows the excitement and chaos of the Paris horse market on the tree-lined Boulevard de l'Hospital, near the Asylum of Salpetrière, whose chapel is visible in the left background. The day is sunny, but ominous gray clouds fill the sky. Through the sunlit trees, people are standing and sitting on a hill.

There is so much to see!

They look at the Percherons, swarthy and muscular horses in shades of black, white and brown, and their riders and walkers. Horses and men are moving from the sunlight of the brown dusty road toward the shade of the base of a hill where the animals are lined up to be sold.

On the left side is a handler walking a dark brown Percheron with a black mane. Along side is an unescorted reddish-brown horse with a white star on his forehead and a cloth blanket. He eyes a green-clad rider on a black horse that is rearing back on his hind legs. Looking at the black nervously is a white horse that begins to stand on his back legs, as a bearded and mustachioed man in a white blouse struggles to hold on to him with one arm.

Marching side by side are two powerful white Percherons with cropped tails; one is mounted by a muscular rider who holds the reins of both animals. The rider, whose head is turned, is talking to another man on a bay. In the rear, two men are struggling with an agitated white horse. Other mounted horsemen are packed in the tight and unruly procession.

The Horse Fair was first exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1853. The painting was an immediate success and it made Rosa Bonheur famous throughout Europe.

Marie Rosalie Bonheur was born in Bordeaux on March 16, 1822. Her father was a drawing master and an artist, and her mother gave music lessons. At an early age Rosa told her father she wanted to be an artist. Her father opposed the idea. He knew how difficult it was to make a living; very few women succeeded in the male dominated arts. Moreover, there were virtually no places where an aspiring woman artist could obtain professional training.

In 1835, Raimond Bonheur withdrew his opposition and agreed to teach drawing to Rosa himself. She learned to handle the paintbrush and the trowel. A year later, at the age of fourteen, Rosa's father sent her to the Louvre, where she studied and copied the paintings, particularly the Italian and Dutch masters.

Her father encouraged her. "Seek your way, daughter," he told her again and again. "Seek your way, try to surpass Mme Vigée-Lebrun (a French portrait painter known for her portraits of Marie-Antoinette and others), whose name is on everyone's lips these days. She's a painter's daughter, too, and she did so well that by the age of twenty-eight she got into the Royal Academy, and now she's a member of the Academies of Rome, Saint Petersburg, and Berlin."

Those words haunted Rosa Bonheur night and day. She ran them over and over in her mind thinking it would be sheer madness to follow Mme Vigée-Lebrun's path. One day she asked her father, "Couldn¹t I become famous by just painting animals?"

"Of course," he replied, "and I'll repeat what a French king once said: "Si dieu le veut, tu le peux" (If it's God's will, you'll find a way). Let this be your motto."

In 1845, Bonheur spent time studying animals in a Paris slaughterhouse, a horrible place for a person who loved animals. Other animal painters had chosen this course of study to learn, and Bonheur was determined to do the same. However, no woman had ever done this before, and she was the object of much ribaldry and jeering from the rough cattle drovers and butchers.

Rosa Bonheur's breakthrough as an animal artist occurred in 1848. That year Bonheur sent in six paintings to the Paris Salon: Oxen and Bulls of Cantal, Grazing Sheep, Running Dog, Ox, Miller on the Road, and Oxen Grazing in Solers. She also sent two bronzes, a bull and ewe, to the sculpture section. The judges of the Salon of 1848 awarded Bonheur a gold medal for all her work.

Just as important, the French government awarded her a magnificent Sèvres vase and a commission of three thousand francs to paint a ploughing motif similar to two of her paintings in the Salon. The work later called Ploughing in the Nivernais was a great success, and it established Rosa Bonheur's reputation as one of France's finest animal painters.

When she was 29 years old, Bonheur began to visit the Paris horse market. Bonheur had dreamt about painting a horse fair for a long time. Deciding to paint a large canvas of the men and animals that she observed at the Paris market, Bonheur knew that she would have to spend considerable time there sketching. Concerned that the men of the horse market would taunt her as those at the slaughterhouse had done, she obtained permission from the Police Prefect to disguise herself.

For the next 18 months, Bonheur dressed as a man and sketched the horse market. During that time, Bonheur was given a commission by M. de Morny on behalf of Emperor Napoleon III to paint a picture for the state museum. The fee was twenty thousand francs.

Bonheur showed him sketches for Haymaking and The Horse Fair.

M. de Morny looked at both carefully and said, "Mademoiselle, both compositions are charming, but I prefer the rustic motif because it does more honor to your overall reputation. You'¹re famous for your oxen and sheep, but you¹ve painted too few horses for us to ask you to paint a scene as turbulent as a horse fair. We have not seen enough of your horses."

Rosa Bonheur replied with her characteristic artist's independence, "M. le Ministre, I am preparing a composition that means a lot to me. I've always loved horses, and I've been studying how they move since tender childhood. I know in particular how remarkable the Percherons are, with their superb high necks and withers. With your permission, I won't begin Haymaking until this one's done."

M. de Morny agreed.

In 1853, Bonheur completed The Horse Fair. It was exhibited that year at the Salon, where it was a tremendous success. The work was acclaimed for its stark realism, masterly use of light and shade, sense of movement, and its monumental size, which was seen as a remarkable feat for a woman.

Despite the success of The Horse Fair, some at the Salon criticized Bonheur's backgrounds and landscapes, a reproach many animal painters of that time experienced. In reaction to the criticism, Bonheur repainted some of the ground, trees and sky, which later explained why the picture had two dates ­ 1853 and 1855 ­ ascribed next to her signature.

After the success at the Salon, The Horse Fair was exhibited at the Ghent exhibition of 1854. It was a triumph and lauded in the French press. Shortly thereafter in 1855, Ernest Gambert, a well-known London art dealer, bought The Horse Fair for the sum of forty thousand francs. Knowing that Gambert wanted to sell engravings of The Horse Fair by subscription, Bonheur made a copy of the painting at quarter size of the original, as it would be easier for the engraver to work with. Two other replicas of The Horse Fair were made, one in oil and the other a water color.

After changing ownership several times, The Horse Fair was put up for auction on March 25, 1887, at Manhattan's Chickering Hall. There was much excitement and activity on the day of the sale. Agents representing the French government, the Corcoran Gallery, and interested parties on the west coast were at the auction. When the sale closed on Friday evening, Rosa Bonheur's masterpiece had been purchased by an agent named Samuel Avery for $55,500 (286,000 francs). When the three thousand people who attended the sale left Chickering Hall, they had no idea who Avery had purchased the picture for.

The next day the public learned who the buyer was. The headline of the New York Times read:

For The People To Enjoy Rosa Bonheur's Great Work In the Art Museum The Horse Fair Presented To The Metropolitan Museum of Art by Cornelius Vanderbilt.

Cornelius Vanderbilt, a wealthy patrician and trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, had purchased the painting and immediately gave it to the museum as a gift. On the morning of March 26, 1887, Rosa Bonheur's The Horse Fair was moved from Chickering Hall to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and hung in the main hall.

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