Column stable smell: The eyes are fighting, the ears are pricked and the fur is shining

She went about the slaughterhouses, anatomy rooms and market halls and museums in trousers with special police permission, never without a sketchpad, and studied her favorite objects, living or dead, at least thoroughly.

Rosalie Bonheur not only loved to paint farm animals, including cattle and horses, but also incredibly well.

She shortened her name to Rosa Bonheur, the -lie was too long or too sweet or both.

Her hometown of Bordeaux is currently holding a retrospective to celebrate the 200th birthday of the artist, who was born on March 16, 1822, the daughter of a painter and early socialist.

Perhaps her best-known and best painting is so large that one can hardly imagine the exertion with which the rather small woman must have wrested the picture from herself and the prejudices against female artists of her time that opposed her work.

Exhibited in 1853 and promptly appraised as such, the masterpiece depicts not the kind of animals women were supposed to paint at the time—songbirds or lap dogs—but some specimens of those smooth-haired, long-legged ungulates that can easily weigh six hundred kilograms or more.

"The horse market" is a wonderful oil painting of about 2.5 by 5 meters and thus as wide as an average SUV is long today.

In other words: too big for the walls of today's living room.

The young painter, just 33 years old at the time, demonstrates her mastery with this work in various respects.

Not only are the heavy draft horses presented for sale fabulously lively and realistic

in terms of anatomy and expression .

The virtuoso pictorial composition is extremely dramatic, with a white horse in the center of the action, many horse bodies and the concentrated horsemen and owners.

The dazzling white horse, on whose forehead, neck, chest and forehand as well as right hindquarters the fur shines brightly, as if erupting from the darker clouds threatening in the sky, has laid its ears back.

It directs the combative look of its right eye to the rising black horse on its right and bares its mouth in its direction.

The white horse has also risen on its hindquarters.

However, there is still a connection to the man leading him via the reins and the gaze of the left eye.

The compositional unity of the two is further supported by the white color of his shirt.

If you take the man's arm raised in the direction of the horse's mouth as a vector, you can understand how Bonheur creates the dynamic of the event through this imagined exciting diagonal in the center.

Also diagonally aligned are the two gray horses next to it, which are slightly shifted to the right from the middle of the picture - specimens of the famous French horse breed "Percherons".

Both step under in a trot, so they are moving forward.