About this artwork
Rosa Bonheur painted The Horse Fair between 1852 and 1855, after spending a year and a half sketching at the horse market on the Boulevard de l'Hopital in Paris. She went twice a week, dressing in men's clothing to avoid attention, and filled notebooks with studies of Percheron draft horses being paraded for buyers.
The canvas is one of the largest paintings in the Met's collection, over eight feet tall and sixteen feet wide. A procession of draft horses moves from right to left across the foreground, driven by grooms who struggle to control them. The horses rear, pull, and twist against their handlers. The dust rises. In the background, the dome of the Salpetriere hospital is visible against a gray sky. The composition has the energy of a frieze, with each group of horses at a different angle, creating a sense of continuous motion.
Bonheur was 30 when she began the painting and already a recognized animal painter in France. The Horse Fair was her breakthrough. It was exhibited at the Salon of 1853 and became the most talked-about painting in Paris. Queen Victoria requested a private viewing. The painting toured Britain and the United States, and Bonheur became one of the most famous painters of the 19th century, and one of the few women to achieve that level of recognition.
The painting is often categorized as Realism, but Bonheur's approach was more academic than that label suggests. She studied horse anatomy from dissections, measured proportions from life, and built her compositions with the structural rigor of a history painter. The energy of the painting comes from observation, not improvisation.
Oil on canvas, 244 by 507 centimeters. Bonheur painted the horses with thick, textured brushwork in the manes and hooves, and smoother handling in the bodies. The palette is dominated by browns, grays, and creams, with the occasional flash of a red cap or a blue blanket. The scale of the original means that even the largest available print captures only a fraction of the surface detail.
The extreme horizontal format makes this print ideal for a long wall: above a sofa, in a dining room, or in a hallway. The earth tones suit rooms with wood floors, leather furniture, and warm lighting. The 18x24 size is the best available option, though the composition really wants to be wider. Hang it where it has room to stretch out.
The painting entered the Met's collection in 1887, gifted by Cornelius Vanderbilt. It was one of the first major gifts to the museum and helped establish the Met's European painting collection.
This is a public domain artwork (CC0), scanned from the original at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. We print it on archival matte paper at sizes from 8x10 to 18x24 inches, framed or unframed. The image is printed at full resolution with no cropping.
