In one dictionary of art, Rosa Bonheur (1822-1899) is given only eight lines and dismissed as a "minor French animal painter." In another, she is lauded (along with Edwin Landseer) as "the most famous animal painter of the 19th century." In this illustrated catalog for a French and American traveling show of 58 paintings, prints, drawings and sculpture by or about Bonheur (who dared to wear trousers and smoke cigarettes in public), she is described as someone who today would be a lesbian, a self-publicist (like her friend Buffalo Bill), and a defender of animal rights. She was also the most gifted member of an amazing family of artists, led by her father, the painter Raymond Bonheur, who (like Charles Willson Peale) set up an artistic workshop in which four of his children (Rosa, Auguste, Isidore, and Juliette) were trained in the manner of Renaissance artists. But all that is long forgotten, and if anyone today has heard of Rosa Bonheur, it is inevitably because of her finest and most famous painting, The Horse Fair (1853). Purchased by Cornelius Vanderbilt, it was brought to the U.S. (where her artistic abilities and personality "meshed with American interest in innovation and bravura") and now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Review from Ballast Quarterly Review, Vol 14 No 1, Autumn 1998)