Horses at the scale of kings

A painting this size is built for one place: the Salon — the official annual state art exhibition in Paris, run by the academy (the government’s art authority), and the single show in France where a career was made or buried. Everyone who was anyone hung there; everyone who wanted to be someone fought to get in. To show at the Salon was to put your work in the one room where all of respectable French art stood together to be ranked against each other, in public, in the newspapers. Bonheur hauled her sixteen feet of horse market to the Salon of 1853, and it went up on the wall next to the gods and the senators and the saints.

Now, by the logic of the place, this should have been a disaster. The Salon’s whole grammar was the hierarchy of genres — that official ranking of subjects, gods and heroes at the top, animals near the bottom — and the unbreakable rule underneath it was about scale. Size was reserved. A big canvas was a public promise that the thing on it mattered enormously, and the right to make a thing matter that much belonged to history painting’s top rung. You were allowed to paint a horse. You were not allowed to paint a horse at the size of a dying emperor. To spend eight by sixteen feet on draft animals and the men who sell them was, in the academy’s arithmetic, a category error loud enough to sound like a provocation.

And here is the twist that makes The Horse Fair a different kind of story from the Burial hanging a few works back along this chain. Courbet’s village funeral, painted at the same heretical scale three years earlier, had detonated — critics called it ugly, dangerous, an assault on beauty itself. Bonheur’s horse market, just as enormous and just as far down the ladder, got the opposite reception. The critics cheered.The picture was widely praised when it was unveiled in 1853, and rather than recoiling from the scale, the Salon was carried away by it. Where Courbet’s monumental commoners read as a threat, Bonheur’s monumental horses read as a triumph.

Why the difference? Partly subject. A funeral full of plain, unflattering peasants made a political argument the propertied classes found menacing two years after a revolution. Horses make no such argument; nobody fears a Percheron. You could thrill to the scale and the skill and the sheer animal power without feeling that your social order was being threatened. And partly it was the simple, undeniable virtuosity. The horses were magnificentlydone, alive and weighty and correct, and even a conservative critic could see that the woman could flat-out paint. The scale that looked like insolence on Courbet’s funeral looked like grandeur on Bonheur’s herd.

There was, though, a barb folded into the applause, and it is the barb that tells you what it cost to be a woman doing this in 1853. Again and again the critics reached for the same word of praise: the painting was masculine. They meant it as the highest compliment they had — vigorous, powerful, large, none of the daintiness they expected from a woman’s brush. But sit with what that compliment assumes. To call the work “masculine” was to say it was good despitebeing made by a woman, that its strength was a kind of borrowed manliness, that the natural state of a woman’s art was small and soft and that Bonheur had heroically escaped it. It was praise and cage at once: the highest thing they could say was that she painted like a man.

Bonheur, to her great credit, mostly ignored the frame and banked the fame. Because that is the other thing the Salon of 1853 did: it made her, overnight, internationally famous. The reputation she’d built with the oxen of the Nivernaisbecame, with the horses of the market, a household name — not just in France but, very soon, across the Channel and the Atlantic. The next chapter is who that household name actually was. The chapter after that is how the painting itself conquered two continents.