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Animal Painting in 19th-Century France
The most talked-about painting at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1855 was not a battle, a martyrdom or an emperor. It was a horse market.
Rosa Bonheur's Horse Fair, an enormous canvas of plunging Percherons, made its painter the most famous woman artist in the world. That tells you what the century thought of animal painting. It gave the genre Salon medals and museum walls, and it produced specialists in everything from lions to poultry. Three separate traditions of French animal painting ran side by side.
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| The wild | The herd | The hunt |
| Delacroix sketched lions at the Paris menagerie and made the big cat a Romantic emblem. | Bonheur, Troyon and Jacque painted livestock from life, standing in the field. | Hounds, game and the farmyard, descending from Snyders and Oudry. |
| Three traditions, one century, and a Salon that gave medals to all three. | ||
The timing is not an accident. The railway reached the provinces in these same decades, the cities filled, and a French public that had just left the countryside started buying pictures of it. The lion at the menagerie and the cow in the meadow answered the same appetite from opposite ends.
A fourth current cuts across the three. Orientalism took French painters to North Africa, and the animals came back in the baggage. Camels, Arabian horses and desert caravans joined the repertoire, painted in oil on canvas with the same seriousness as the herds of Normandy.
Horses, dogs, cattle, sheep
Which Animal Subjects Come to Market |
Horses and dogs are the deepest collector fields, and they were also the most painted, because they were the animals people owned and named. A signed nineteenth-century horse painting or dog portrait carries an audience that no other animal subject does.
Cattle and sheep were painted by the same hands, to the same standard, in the same decades, and they are the quiet part of the field. So are the birds, the poultry yards and the game pieces that descend from the Flemish still life tradition.
The wild animals are rarer on the market than the Romantic reputation suggests. Lions and tigers were painted from the menagerie by a small number of specialists, and a genuine period canvas of one is an uncommon thing.
Three rules
Buying an Antique Animal Painting |
Judge the animal like a face. A good animal painting gives you a creature that breathes, in fur or feather rendered with real command. If the eye is dead, nothing else in the picture will save it.
Look at what is out of fashion. Dogs and horses have the deepest collector bases and hunt scenes hold a steady audience. Cattle and sheep were painted by the same hands, to the same standard, and nobody is looking.
Read the attribution. The animal field carries a great many circle and follower pictures, because the Salon specialists were widely imitated. Those terms are precise, and knowing what each one claims is the difference between buying well and guessing. Our guide to reading attribution sets out the seven terms in order.
In public collections
Where to See the Three Traditions |
Rosa Bonheur, The Horse Fair, 1855. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Rosa Bonheur, Ploughing in the Nivernais, 1849. Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
Eugène Delacroix, Lion Hunt, 1855. Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux.
Constant Troyon, Cattle Drinking. Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.
Jean-Baptiste Oudry, hunting still lifes and animal studies. Musée du Louvre, Paris.
| → | The next questionWhich animal was painted more than any other?The dog, and it is the one field where the market organises itself by breed. |
Sources. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Musée d'Orsay, Musée du Louvre, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux, Walters Art Museum.
