The Horse Fair, 1855 Rosa Bonheur (1822-1899)

We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas.

We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.

High quality and detailing in every inch are time consuming. The reproduction of Rosa Bonheur also needs time to dry in order to be completely ready for shipping, as this is crucial to not be damaged during transportation.
Based on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 8-9 weeks to complete the process.

In case the delivery date needs to be extended in time, or we are overloaded with requests, there will be an email sent to you sharing the new timelines of production and delivery.

TOPofART wants to remind you to keep patient, in order to get you the highest quality, being our mission to fulfill your expectations.

We not stretch and frame our oil paintings due to several reasons:
Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
Also, there are postal restrictions, regarding the size of the shipment.
Additionally, due to the dimensions of the stretched canvas, the shipment price may exceed the price of the product itself.

You can stretch and frame your painting in your local frame-shop.

Once the painting The Horse Fair is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.

We offer free shipping as well as paid express transportation services.

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The paintings we create are only of museum quality. Our academy graduated artists will never allow a compromise in the quality and detail of the ordered painting. TOPofART do not work, and will never allow ourselves to work with low quality studios from the Far East. We are based in Europe, and quality is our highest priority.

Dust seems to hang in the air, warm and gritty, as hooves churn the boulevard into a pale brown haze. A white Percheron surges across the right foreground, its rump catching the light like polished marble, while another rears and twists behind it. This is not a tidy market scene but a controlled near-disaster, the kind of spectacle that makes your shoulders tense.

Rosa Bonheur sets the whole drama on a diagonal. A long avenue of trees slides away from right to left, their diminishing scale carrying you deep into Paris and, eventually, to the distant dome of the Salpêtrière asylum. That recession gives the crush of bodies room to breathe, yet the foreground remains packed with muscular interruption: horses crossing, handlers lunging, ropes pulled taut. Notice one small, almost throwaway touch: the quick, pale streaks along a white flank that read as dust and sweat at once, paint laid on with a brisk confidence.

Brilliant daylight does much of the work. It doesn’t romanticise; it exposes. Highlights skate over enormous backs and tense shoulders, then drop abruptly into shadow under bellies and between legs, where danger lives. Bonheur’s colour is earth-bound - umbers, siennas, sooty blacks - so that the whites feel newly washed, almost metallic. One might imagine the sound: snorting, shouted instructions, leather creaking, iron on stone.

For over a year Bonheur attended the horse fairs held twice weekly on the Boulevard de l’Hôpital, sketching and absorbing the place. Handlers, she noted, would provoke forceful movement to show strength and agility to buyers. Yet buyers are absent here, and that omission subtly changes everything. Without commerce to civilise the scene, it tips toward something elemental - labour, animal power, human bravado.

She knew the Parthenon frieze, those mounted figures mastering rearing horses, and she studied Géricault too; you can feel that Romantic charge. Still, Rosa Bonheur insists on her own realism, sharp as a snapshot but richer in empathy. No wonder she sought official permission to dress in men’s clothes as “a protection” while working. In The Horse Fair, now in the National Gallery London UK england united kingdom, Bonheur doesn’t ask you to admire from a distance. She makes you stand close enough to smell the sweat and reckon with the beauty of sheer force.