The trousers were a work permit
Twice a week, for about a year and a half, a small, short-haired figure in a man’s smock and trousers stood at the edge of the Paris horse market with a sketchbook, drawing animals nobody else thought worth drawing. The figure was a woman named Rosa Bonheur(1822–1899), and she was not in disguise for the fun of it. She was at work. The market she had chosen — loud, filthy, crowded with stamping draft horses and the men who wrangled them — was no place a respectable Frenchwoman in a wide skirt could stand for hours without becoming the spectacle herself. So Bonheur did the practical thing: she got the clothes that let her do the job.
That meant a trip to the police. Under a French law on the books since 1800, a woman could not legally wear trousers in Paris without official permission — a literal government document called a permission de travestissement(a “permit to cross-dress,” which had to be renewed every six months). Bonheur applied for one and got it, on the entirely reasonable grounds that men’s clothing let her move through the markets, the slaughterhouses, the stockyards and the riding schools where she studied animals — places a long skirt made impossible. This detail gets told, far too often, as a quirky costume anecdote. It is better understood as what it was: a working professional acquiring the right equipment. Painters need to see their subject up close. Hers happened to live in places the law dressed her out of.
The painter who only painted animals
Bonheur was an animalière — the feminine form of animalier, the name for a painter who specializes in animals as the main subject, not as scenery behind a person. It was a real specialty with a real ranking, and the ranking was low. European art ran on an official ladder of subject matter, the hierarchy of genres(the Realism overview one level up in this app lays it out in full): grand scenes from myth and scripture and ancient history at the top, plain modern life at the bottom, and animals down there near the floor with the still lifes. A painter of cows and horses was, by the academy’s own arithmetic, doing humble work. Bonheur’s whole career is the story of taking that humble category and making it pay, and matter, like the grand one.
She came to it honestly. Her father, Raymond Bonheur, was a drawing teacher and a believer in a utopian sect that preached the equality of women — an unusual household to grow up in, and one that took her ambition seriously when most families would have steered a daughter toward a husband. By the time she set up at the horse market she was already a name. Her Ploughing in the Nivernais(1849), a great frieze of oxen dragging a plough through heavy earth, had been commissioned by the French state and had won a First Medal at the Salon (the Salon’s top prize) — the Salon being the official annual exhibition that made and broke careers (Chapter 3 gets into the Salon properly). So the woman in trousers at the horse market in 1850 was not an unknown trying to break in. She was a decorated professional going after a harder subject.
The rawest horse subject in Paris
And horses were a harder subject. Oxen plod; you can draw a plodding ox at leisure. The Paris horse market, held twice a week on the tree-lined Boulevard de l’Hôpital on the Left Bank, was the opposite of leisure: heavy draft horses led, reared, wheeled and fought against their handlers while buyers haggled and the whole churning mass kicked up dust. To paint that, you cannot work from a calm model standing in a studio. You have to be there, in the noise, catching the motion of an animal that will not hold still for thirty seconds, and then doing it again, and again, for eighteen months, until you have hundreds of studies of how a panicking half-ton horse actually moves its legs.
Bonheur went further than sketching the living animals. To get the muscle right — the way a haunch bunches, the way a foreleg takes weight — she studied dead ones, dissecting carcasses and working in the abattoirs (the slaughterhouses), the same places her trousers permit let her enter. It is not a delicate way to learn to paint a horse. It is an anatomist’s way, and it is exactly why her horses, when you finally see the finished canvas, have a weight and a correctness that a prettier painter’s never would. She earned that ton of muscle the hard way, by the ounce, in the dust and the slaughterhouse, in clothes the law made her ask permission to wear.
The result of those eighteen months is the largest, most ambitious thing she ever made — a canvas eight feet tall and over sixteen feet wide, built to put the whole churning market on a single wall. The next chapter is what it actually looks like.