Rosa Bonheur's Horse Fair

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While walking through the European Painting Galleries in the Metropolitan Museum of Art one cannot avoid noticing Rosa Bonheur’s The Horse Fair. The painting is monumental, taking up an entire wall and standing eight feet high. The horses and humans are almost life sized and are so carefully and realistically depicted that one feel as though they are watching the parade of horses march through the museum. Rosa Bonheur is famous for her realistic illustrations of animals and The Horse Fair is her most celebrated work.
Rosa Bonheur was born on May 16th 1822 in Bordeaux, France. Her parents raised her in a unique environment; encouraging her to be artistic at a young age. Her father was an unsuccessful landscape painter and was Bonheur’s first teacher. He encouraged her to draw animals and allowed her to have many pets in order to study them.
As a teenager to bring money into the house Bonheur made and sold copies of works of art from the Louvre. This copying of works is how she learned much about drawing and painting; copying techniques and carefully observing the works of great artists. For further education Bonheur studied the anatomy of animals by visiting slaughterhouses and preforming dissections. All of her artistic instruction came from her father and herself because of the sexism in the art academies in France; women were discouraged in attending. Regardless of her stereotype Bonheur was determined to show her talent and compete with men.
The most interesting facts about Bonheur’s life surround her lifestyle. She was a homosexual who cross dressed and smoked infinite cigarettes. She was known to complain about the complications of female dress and chose to wear pants and shirts instead. She felt she fit in better wearing such clothes; she was actually arrested by a French police officer, accused of being a man dressed as a woman on an occasion when she

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