Rosa Bonheur Paints Buffalo Bill, Paris 1889

A man in a fringed buckskin jacket and a wide-brimmed hat rides a dappled white horse down a dirt track, with a line of trees and a cloudy summer sky behind him. The canvas is small, about eighteen by fifteen inches, and the rider is the most famous American in Europe at the time: William F. Cody, better known as Buffalo Bill. The painter was the most celebrated woman artist of the century, Rosa Bonheur.

She painted Col. William F. Cody in France in 1889, and the story of how it came about is one of the happiest meetings in nineteenth-century art.

The Wild West comes to Paris

In 1889 Paris hosted the Exposition Universelle, the world's fair remembered today for the brand-new Eiffel Tower. Cody brought his Wild West show to the city, with its riders, sharpshooters, Indian performers and their families, and herds of horses and buffalo. Parisians were enchanted.

So was Bonheur. By then she was 67, famous across Europe and America for her animals: oxen, horses, sheep, dogs and lions. Her 1849 Salon picture of oxen ploughing in the Nivernais had been commissioned by the French state, and her enormous Horse Fair had made her name in Britain and the United States. In 1865 she had become the first woman artist to receive the Legion of Honour.

It was also a hard year for her. Nathalie Micas, her companion of more than forty years, died in June 1889. According to the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, it was her art dealer who arranged for her to visit the Wild West camp, hoping it would lift her out of her grief.

An artist behind the scenes

It worked. Bonheur went to the show's grounds again and again to sketch the American animals and the Indian riders, their horses, tents and families. She later said that working among them at close range had refreshed her "sad old mind", and that Buffalo Bill had been extremely good to her. The American sculptor Cyrus Dallin, then a student in Paris, often went with her to the encampment at Neuilly to draw. The Center of the West counts seventeen paintings she made from these visits.

To thank Cody, she invited him to lunch at her home, the Château de By near Fontainebleau, and offered to paint his portrait for nothing. That was a rare gift. Bonheur seldom painted people on horseback, and her work commanded very high prices.

Painted with an animal painter's eye

Look closely and you can see where her real interest lay. Cody is upright and composed, but the horse is the more alive of the two: ears pricked forward, one foreleg lifted mid-stride, the grey dapples on its white coat, its shadow falling across the dusty road. It is the eye of someone who had spent her life studying animals in fields, markets and stables, the same eye that shaped her quieter studies such as A Limier Briquet Hound and Tête de lion relevée.

For Bonheur, as the museum puts it, Cody stood for the freedom and independence of the United States. The same year, back in America, Frederic Remington was painting the West as a scene of action in A Dash for the Timber. Bonheur's picture is the opposite: calm, still and almost formal, a portrait of a man and his horse rather than a story.

"Save the Bonheur"

Cody was proud of the painting. He sent it home to North Platte, Nebraska, and when his house there caught fire, he wired his sister Julia, urging her to save the Bonheur and let the house burn. The image went on to appear on countless Wild West posters and programs, including one showing Bonheur seated between Cody and Napoleon, each on horseback.

Today the original belongs to the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming, the town Cody himself founded. It was part of the opening exhibition of the museum's Whitney Gallery of Western Art in April 1959.

Living with it

Because the original is small, this is a picture that looks right at modest sizes: on a bookshelf, in a study or above a desk, in a dark wood or walnut frame. It pairs naturally with Remington's Western scenes, or with Bonheur's own animals for a wall of horses and hounds. See all of our Rosa Bonheur prints.