Of Men, Women and Horses

By Fred Glueckstein

Of Men, Women and Horses is a collection of stories about one of historys most enduring relationships; those of men, women and, the most noble of animals, horses. The collection includes the touching and inspiring true stories of Rosa Bonheur and The Horse Fair (1853); Capt. Myles Keogh and Comanche (1876); Anna Sewell and Black Beauty (1877); Richard Stone Reeves and War Admiral (1937); Jacqueline Bouvier (Kennedy) and Danseuse (1940); Lt. Ed Ramsey and Bryn Awryn (1942); Gen. George S. Patton and the Lipizzaners (1945); Marguerite Henry and Misty of Chincoteague (1947); Sir Winston S. Churchill and Colonist II (1949); Dick Francis and Devon Loch (1956); Sir Alfred J. Munnings: An Artists Life (1959), and the champion Thoroughbred race horses Exterminator (1918), Black Gold (1924), Gallant Fox (1930), Omaha (1935), and Assault (1946).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 31, 2006
• ISBN: 9781469113074

Fred Glueckstein

Fred Glueckstein is a columnist and the author of several nonfiction books including The ‘27 Yankees; Mickey Mantle: Rookie in Pinstripes, and Mimi of Nový Bohumín, Czechoslovakia: A Young Woman’s Survival of the Holocaust (1938-1945). He was also a finalist for the Army Historical Foundation’s Distinguished Writing Award in 2006 for his article for ARMY magazine on the last mounted cavalry charge in U.S.military history. Raised in the Bronx, Fred lives with his wife, Eileen, in Kings Park, New York. They have two children, Brian and Debra.

Book preview

Rosa Bonheur and The Horse Fair (1853)

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, adjacent to Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier’s painting Friedland, 1807, is a mammoth oil canvas—approximately 8 x 16 ½ ft. (244.5 x 506.7 cm)—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’ Hôspital, 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 sunlight 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 towards 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. Alongside 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 across Europe.

Marie Rosalie Bonheur was born in Bordeaux on March 16, 1822. Known as Rosa since childhood, she was the oldest of four children born to Christine-Dorothee-Sophie Marchisio, known as Marquis, and Raimond-Oscar-Marie Bonheur. Her father was a drawing master and an artist, and her mother gave music lessons.

At an early age Sophie encouraged Rosa to draw. At the age of six, Rosa’s father left the family in Bordeaux, traveling to Paris to find a better position to support his wife and children. By the end of the year, they were reunited in Paris and lived in the Rue Saint-Antoine, where they began an impoverished and itinerant life. From 1827 to 1830, Rosa attended a school for boys and girls at a time when it was unusual for girls to attend school at all.

In 1832, Raimond Bonheur again left his wife and children to join a utopian group in Paris called Saint-Simonian, which advocated a form of religious socialism. In his absence, Rosa’s mother Sophie worked hard to make ends meet. She took the children for weekly visits with their father. However, exhaustion overcame her in 1833, and Sophie Bonheur died at the age of thirty-six. She was buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave.

Rosa Bonheur was eleven when her mother died. The circumstances of her death and the unsuccessful attempts later to find her remains caused Bonheur a great deal of sorrow for the rest of the artist’s life.

With his wife’s passing, Raimond Bonheur returned home. 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, Couldn’t 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 1841, the family moved to the Rue Rumford on the outskirts of Paris. It was near fields and farms and gave Rosa a chance to study farm animals. That year she exhibited her first paintings, a study of rabbits eating carrots and a drawing of goats and sheep, at the annual exhibition of arts at the Paris Salon.

Bonheur’s father remarried a widow from Auvergne in 1842, and that same year Rosa submitted two paintings of horses to the Salon. She kept on studying and painting, and each year the young woman sent her best work to the Salon, where they were exhibited. In 1844, she dropped her baptismal name and chose her professional signature, Rosa Bonheur, to honor her mother.

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 jeer from the rough cattle drovers and butchers. That same year, Bonheur sent in six paintings to the Salon and won a bronze medal.

Rosa Bonheur’s breakthrough as an animal artist occurred in 1848. That year Bonheur sent in six paintings: 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.

In the summer of 1850, Bonheur began to visit the Paris horse market. At that time, Bonheur was 28-years-old. She was five feet tall, the average height for a woman at that time, had dark brown eyes, which some have described as almost black, a high forehead, a large nose, and a firm chin.

Bonheur had dreamt about painting a horse fair for a long time. Some six years earlier in 1844, she had received from M. Richard, head of the Horsebreeding School in Cantal, a copy of his book Study of the Horse, which I found very useful, she later wrote. After Bonheur and M. Richard became acquaintances, he rounded out her knowledge of the horse’s anatomy.

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 twice a week. She also studied the horses at the Paris Omnibus Company, whose workhorses pulled the buses through the city. 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’re famous for your oxen and sheep, but you’ve 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.

Rosalia Shriver, who catalogued Bonheur’s works in American collections, wrote: No other woman had ever achieved a work of such force and brilliance; and no other animal painter had produced a work of such size. Bonheur could labor for another forty-six years, but the painting would remain her masterpiece.

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. Afterwards, the picture was shown in the city of Bonheur’s birth—Bordeaux. Rosa wanted very much to see her picture permanently hung in the Bordeaux museum, and she offered to sell it for fifteen thousand francs. The city commissioners, who thought I was being presumptuous, turned me down, she later wrote adding: I didn’t take that too well.

Shortly thereafter in 1855, Ernest Gambert, a well-known London art dealer, bought The Horse Fair for the sum of forty thousand francs. Ironically, the day after Bonheur agreed to sell her work, the marquis de Chennevières, then the director of the Fine Arts Division of the French government, asked if she would substitute The Horse Fair, which M. de Morny had turned down, for Haymaking. Regretfully, with the painting already sold, Bonheur declined the marquis’ request.

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. Later, Jacob Bell, a wealthy art lover, bought the smaller version from Gambert and left it to the National Gallery in London. Two other replicas of The Horse Fair were made, one in oil and the other a watercolor.

Meanwhile, accompanied by Rosa Bonheur and her companion Nathalie Micas, Gambert took The Horse Fair to England, where it was exhibited at his gallery in London and widely admired. Queen Victoria had it brought to Windsor Castle for a private showing, which caused a stir with the public. Afterwards, people flocked to Gambert’s gallery to see Bonheur’s masterpiece. The painting was also successfully exhibited in Birmingham.

In 1857, William P. Wright, an American from Weehawken, New Jersey, offered to buy the painting for 30,000 francs. Gambert agreed to sell it with the stipulation that he could exhibit it in America for three years and own the rights to the publication of its engraved reproduction, which