Col. William F. Cody (Buffalo Bill)

Col. William F. Cody (Buffalo Bill), painted in 1889, is one of Rosa Bonheur's most historically distinctive works, produced when Buffalo Bill Cody brought his Wild West Show to Paris and Bonheur — fascinated by the horses, the Native American performers, and the unfamiliar American West — visited the show repeatedly and was permitted to make studies. The portrait of Cody himself places Bonheur in the unexpected position of history painter, commemorating an international celebrity of the entertainment world at the moment of his greatest European fame. Bonheur depicted Cody on horseback, a format that connected her expertise in equine subjects to the demands of portraiture, and the resulting work has a vigour that reflects her genuine enthusiasm for her subject — she described Cody as the most handsome man she had ever seen. The Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming, holds the portrait as a major artefact of the Wild West's cultural history. The painting is significant not only as a portrait but as evidence of Bonheur's engagement with American subjects — a departure from her exclusively European animal and pastoral material that resulted in some of the most unusual work of her late career.

The equestrian portrait format combines Bonheur's lifelong expertise in horse painting with the demands of portraiture. The horse is handled with the anatomical confidence of her animal studies while Cody's figure receives the detailed characterisation appropriate to a commissioned or commemorative portrait.