Afterlife

The afterlife of The Horse Fair is, before it is anything else, a business story — and the businessman is Ernest Gambart, a Belgian-born art dealer based in London who became Bonheur’s promoter and, in effect, her impresario. In 1854 Gambart bought the great canvas from her for 40,000 French francs, a serious sum, and then did something cleverer than simply reselling it. He touredit. He took the painting around Britain as a paying attraction, charging the public to come and stand in front of it — and the public came, in numbers, because there was nothing else like it. (By the well-worn story, even Queen Victoria asked to see it privately; treat the royal detail as the kind of flourish that attaches itself to a famous picture, while the tour itself is solid.)

Gambart’s real genius, though, was in the copy. He was a pioneer of what we would now call reproduction rights — the idea that the money in a painting isn’t only in the one canvas but in the thousands of prints you can pull from it. He had The Horse Fair turned into an engraving (a print made from an image cut into a metal plate, the era’s technology for mass-producing a picture), the work done by the engraver Thomas Landseerfrom a smaller half-size copy. The print sold and sold. Within a few years, the composition — the rearing greys, the diagonal, the dust — hung in parlors all over Britain and America, in the form of a print, in homes whose owners would never see the original. Bonheur became famous in two countries before most of her fans had stood in front of a single brushstroke she made.

That half-size copy has its own life. To make the engraving possible, Bonheur painted a reduced version of The Horse Fair — about four feet tall and eight feet wide, half the dimensions of the original — and she had help with it from Nathalie Micas. That smaller twin ended up in England, bequeathed by the collector Jacob Bell — who died in 1859 — and entered the National Gallery in London’s collection in 1865 (where it still hangs). So there are, in effect, two authentic Horse Fairs on public view on opposite sides of an ocean: the colossal original in New York, and its half-size sister in Trafalgar Square — the very canvas that launched the print that made the image famous.

The original, meanwhile, kept climbing the ladder of rich owners. After Gambart it passed to the English collector William Parkinson Wright in 1857, and then, in 1866, it crossed the Atlantic into the collection of Alexander Turney Stewart, the New York department-store magnate and one of the wealthiest men in America. When Stewart’s widow’s estate was auctioned in 1887, the painting fetched $53,000 — an astonishing price — and the buyer was Cornelius Vanderbilt II, of the railroad dynasty. Vanderbilt did not keep it. He immediately gave it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the great public museum then taking shape on Fifth Avenue, just steps from his own mansion.

It has hung there ever since — “Gift of Cornelius Vanderbilt, 1887” — one of the most popular paintings in the building. There is a tidy irony in the whole journey. A woman who had to ask the police for permission to wear the clothes she sketched in painted a market full of farm horses at the scale of a coronation, and that canvas was cheered at the Salon, toured for profit through Britain, engraved into a print in a hundred thousand parlors, copied for London, and finally handed to the American public by a railroad heir — the humblest possible subject, raised to the grandest possible scale, and carried clear around the world by its own undeniable force.

Step back from the business and the biography and the painting’s argument is simple, and it is the Realism argument in a different key. Courbet, a few works back along this chain, took the most ordinary death there is and painted it at the scale of kings. Bonheur took the most ordinary workthere is — men moving animals at a market — and did the same. No myth, no allegory, no hero: just draft horses and the dust they kick up, rendered with anatomist’s precision and given the eight-by-sixteen-foot wall the academy kept for gods. That the Salon cheered it instead of recoiling only proves the argument worked. The present, ordinary and unglamorous, could carry the full weight of the grandest art — and a woman in a borrowed pair of trousers had proved it on the biggest canvas in the room.