Collection: Rosa Bonheur

Rosa Bonheur (born Marie-Rosalie Bonheur; 16 March 1822 – 25 May 1899) was a French artist known best as a painter of animals (animalière). She also made sculptures in a realist style. Her paintings include Ploughing in the Nivernais, first exhibited at the Salon of 1849, and now in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, and The Horse Fair (in French: Le marché aux chevaux), which was exhibited at the Salon of 1853 (finished in 1855) and is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Bonheur was widely considered to be the most famous female painter of the nineteenth century. It has been said that Bonheur was openly lesbian, as she lived with her partner Nathalie Micas for over 40 years until Micas's death. After that she lived with American painter Anna Elizabeth Klumpke. However, others assert that nothing supports this speculation.

She trained under Raymond Bonheur. She drew inspiration from Saint-Simonianism. Among her most cited paintings: Ten Studies of a Ram, Gray Horse in Green, Ploughing in the Nivernais, and The Horse Fair. Her principal genres were animal art. Her practice is associated with Naturalism.

Her oeuvre belongs more precisely to the French Realism current.