Michael Anthony Fowler (East Tennessee State University)
In 1853, Rosa Bonheur first exhibited what would become her most widely celebrated work: The Horse Fair (final version, 1855), a monumental, horizontally oriented painting representing an energetic scene from the regular horse markets held on Paris’ Boulevard de l’Hôpital. Although the work’s modern setting and animal-focused subject matter do not obviously characterize it as an instance of classical reception, the artist described the painting as her own Parthenon frieze. Indeed, a close inspection of the composition reveals several horses and riders whose postures mirror those found in the cavalcade sections of the Parthenon frieze. A significant amount of feminist and queer scholarship has been dedicated to Rosa Bonheur’s life, career, and art practices, all of which reveal the complex ways in which the artist negotiated the gender norms of the Victorian era (e.g., Boime 1981; Saslow 2018 [1992]; Chadwick 1993; van Slyke 1998). These ranged from her decision never to marry, instead living in households with two women, to her officially sanctioned practice of cross-dressing when conducting art studies in public. Previous interpretations of The Horse Fair have benefitted from these and other insights, most notably with respect to how the burgeoning nineteenth-century discourses on animal rights tracked onto the nascent women’s
rights movement. In view of all these things, one of the most remarkable elements of The Horse Fair is the very probable inclusion of the artist’s self-portrait, clad in masculine clothing and riding with legs astride her mount. In this paper, I wish to explore the sartorial and equestrian significance of this self-portrait further. Taking seriously the Parthenonian parallel, how are we to understand Rosa Bonheur’s presence in this male-dominated arena? By classical analogy, we might understand her to be a gender-bending Amazon. In fact, by the mid-19th century, the epithet amazon(e) began to be applied pejoratively to fashionable bourgeoise women who preferred to travel on horse rather than carriage (cf. David 2002). I argue, through a comparative consideration of contemporary visualizations, by male artists, of the Victorian-era ‘Amazonian’ rider trope, that Rosa Bonheur appropriates this imagery yet redirects it toward the very claim that the trope anxiously mocked: gender equality.