ABSTRACT
Analysis of several related paintings, principally her masterpiece The Horse Fair, in conjunction with the artist's biography, demonstrates that Rosa Bonheur's art offers a radical intervention in the visual and cultural construction of nineteenth-century femininity and masculinity. If Bonheur's occasional self-images attest to efforts to circumvent social constrictions, the general absence of human subjects from her work-her displacement of the aesthetic gaze onto nonhuman creatures, whom she viewed as extensions of herself-attests to an attempt to transcend those constrictions. Bonheur's level of conscious motivation in 1853, her self-portrait in The Horse Fair provides visual testimony to the first steps toward the construction of a public lesbian identity and to how narrow was the path those first steps had to tread. In the last three decades of the century, theories of homosexuality and gender variance that were not yet formulated at the time of The Horse Fair, and which remain largely implicit in Bonheur's own imagery, were explicitly articulated by others.
