For a year and half Rosa Bonheur dressed in men’s clothes and wandered the Parisian horse market at the Boulevard de l’Hôpital. Her sketches informed The Horse Fair, a painting of such grand scale that Bonheur called it her “Parthenon frieze.” The Horse Fair was first shown in the Paris Salon in 1583, but Rosa reworked the painting for the next two years. 32 years later the painting was purchased at auction by Cornelius Vanderbilt II for $53,000, something like $1.6 today, and donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
