Twice a week for a year and a half, from the summer of 1850, Rosa Bonheur stood at the horse market on the Boulevard de l'Hopital in Paris and drew. She went dressed as a man, to be left alone. Doing that legally in France meant written permission from the police, renewed every six months.
The permit
An ordinance of 1800 made it illegal for a woman in Paris to wear trousers without permission from the police. The permission existed — a permission de travestissement, granted on medical grounds — and Bonheur applied for one so that she could stand in a horse market all morning without a crowd forming round her.
The document that survives in her name is dated 12 May 1857. It licenses her to dress as a man, has to be renewed twice a year, gives health as the reason, and specifically does not cover theatres, balls or any public gathering. She wore the clothes at home and in the country anyway. The paperwork was for the street.
The 1800 ordinance was not formally repealed until 2013.
Five metres of horses
The canvas is two and a half metres high and over five metres wide. The animals are Percherons and other draught horses, led round in a circle in front of buyers sitting on the grass bank, which is how the market worked. The hospital of the Salpetriere stands in the left background, so the place is exact.
Bonheur named her sources without embarrassment — Stubbs, Gericault, Delacroix, Greek sculpture — and called the picture her own Parthenon frieze. It went to the Paris Salon in May 1853 and the critics praised it, several of them remarking on how masculine the work was.
She came back to it in 1855 to finish a few things, and rather than repaint the date she added a digit to the end of it. The signature reads Rosa Bonheur 1853.5.
Fifteen thousand francs, then fifty-three thousand dollars
Bordeaux was offered it in 1854 and would not pay fifteen thousand francs. The London dealer Ernest Gambart bought it that year for forty thousand, took it round Britain from 1855 to 1857, showed it in Edwin Landseer's own house, and Queen Victoria asked for it to be brought to Buckingham Palace so that she could look at it in private.
Gambart sold it on in 1857 for thirty thousand francs. It changed hands again in 1866, and in March 1887 Cornelius Vanderbilt the second bought it at auction in New York for fifty-three thousand dollars and gave it to the Metropolitan Museum the same year. The Metropolitan calls it one of its best-known works of art.
A half-size replica, painted with her partner Nathalie Micas, went to the National Gallery in London in 1859. Two countries have thought they owned the picture ever since.
A city would not pay fifteen thousand francs for it. Five metres of horses now fits under a cup, which is its own kind of bargain.
Some stories are better over a coffee. Fifteen minutes with someone — audio only, not open yet.