Pin-up Art & Artists – Lovely Pinup and Fine Art

Oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Cornelius Vanderbilt, 1887.
White, black, and brown horses crowd a tree-lined Paris road. Two rear near the center as handlers guide the group past spectators on a grassy bank.

A quick sketch of the artist and her art

The people on the grassy bank in “The Horse Fair” picked a sensible spot. From their vantage pint, they can watch the horses pass by without worrying about getting stepped on. Artist Rosa Bonheur, though, puts the rest of us down at road level, where a dapple-gray horse swings across the foreground and a pair of raised hooves seems much too close.

Born Marie-Rosalie Bonheur in Bordeaux in 1822, Rosa trained with her father, the painter Raymond Bonheur, and practiced her skills by copying paintings at the Louvre. She first exhibited at the Paris Salon, France’s major public art exhibition, in 1841. A government commission led to “Ploughing in the Nivernais, a painting of working oxen that established her reputation at the 1849 Salon. Musée d’Orsay· National Museum of Women in the Arts.

To prepare “The Horse Fair”, Bonheur went to the horse market on Paris’s Boulevard de l’Hôpital twice a week for about eighteen months. She wore men’s clothes to draw less attention while she sketched. At the 1853 Salon, she presented a horse market on the scale of a grand history painting. The canvas, more than sixteen feet wide, drew praise at the exhibition. Bonheur retouched it in 1855. The Met]· Musée d’Orsa

Sales of paintings and prints helped Bonheur buy the Château de By, on the edge of the Fontainebleau forest. She moved there in 1860 with her longtime partner, Nathalie Micas, and Micas’s mother. Micas helped prepare canvases, and the horses, dogs, and other animals they kept and which gave Bonheur subjects to draw from life daily. Musée d’Orsay· Royal Collection Trust.

An unexpected visitor

On June 14, 1864, Bonheur was painting deer when she heard carriage wheels, bells, and cracking whips outside. As she later recalled to the painter Anna Klumpke, Micas rushed into the studio with a skirt and jacket. Empress Eugénie had arrived, and Bonheur had just enough time to change out of her work smock before greeting her. She showed the empress the deer painting still in progress. By the time Eugénie left, she had commissioned a painting for her own collection. Bonheur’s account, published by Anna Klumpke.

Eugénie returned the following year to pin the cross of the Legion of Honor on Bonheur, the first woman artist to receive the distinction. In 1894, five years before her death, Bonheur became the first woman promoted to officer in the order. Archives of the Legion of Honor.

Bonheur called “The Horse Fair” her own Parthenon frieze. Follow the horses from left to right and you can see what she meant. Their heads rise, dip, and rise again across the long canvas. Some hooves are planted while others hang in the air. The whole procession pulls your eye around the bend. The Met.

I first discovered Rosa Bonheur through her cat paintings. Below is one of my favorites by Bonheur…

Wild Cat by Rosa Bonheur • A print of this image is available on eBay, click link.

Horsies When I was five this suburban boy       rode a horse in the wild countryside of the Rockies not far from       Alamosa, Colorado, to go fishing – traveling to a hidden spot with my father and uncle       and older brother Jon. By riding, I mean, sitting on the horse       behind my brother holding on tightly, by countryside, I mean, meadows and forests       pines and other trees too close together and with too many branches. The fishing spot was a pond under dark trees       with lots of fish that did not want our bait, the ride there and back was a collection       of unpredictable painful bounces, dodging trees and their woody grasps,       all the while, wrapped in a constant fear of falling, which I not did not do,       if you do not count my two dismounts, which were akin to falling off,       and the scrambling away from the legs and hooves       that could kick and crunch me. My chance to redeem my horse experiences came,       in my high school years, when a girl friend asked my to go riding       on a Saturday morning – I could face my fears and who knew       where a romantic ride would lead to! The stables did not give me a friendly horse,       it was cantankerous beast, with wild looking eyes, after several awkward, sweaty and embarrassing tries,       I managed to arrive in the saddle – though I still don’t know which foot       should go into the stirrup – and the horse and I meandered in step next to       that luscious beauty on her own personal roan to the start of the trail, when my horse halted abruptly –       it would not go further. I snicked clicked from the side of my mouth,       “snick-click, snick-click.” Then I said “giddyup.” Not a twitch of a tail. My hands flicked the reins,       my feet kicked its sides, nothing – it wouldn’t move. Shamefully, I quickly gave up,       I had ridden the horse a good sixty feet and was still alive,       that was good enough for me. I did my traditional falling dismount,       a stable hand took the horse away and my now lost to me, still luscious love,       rode off into a glorious sunny morning, hair streaming, leaving me behind and limping to my car. Horses cost me, in my early childhood,       the dream of ever being a cowboy, and in high school, postponed,       my hopes of scoring until much later in life. ©2026 Carl Scott Harker, publisher of Western Love Western Magic by Limon Lamar