Rosa Bonheur

born Bordeaux, France, 1822; died Fontainebleau, France, 1899

BiographyRosa Bonheur was born in Bordeaux, France, in 1822 and was taught by her father, Raymond Bonheur, who was also a painter. She began exhibiting paintings at the Paris Salon in 1841 and continued to do so through 1853. Bonheur’s work featured animals, which she always sketched from life. Her 16-foot-long painting The Horse Fair, now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, earned her international acclaim in 1853. Bonheur saw George Catlin’s Indian Gallery and his Native American performers when they came to Paris in 1845 and soon developed an interest in the American West. When William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody came to Paris in 1889 for the Exposition Universelle he invited her to come to the grounds of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. Bonheur in turn invited him to her home Chateâu By, where she made a full-length painting of him that he later reproduced in posters advertising Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.

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