Pegasus

Pegasus, painted around 1850, is an unusual work within Rosa Bonheur's oeuvre, engaging with mythological subject matter that she largely avoided in favour of naturalist observation. The winged horse of Greek mythology had been a persistent subject in European art from antiquity through the Renaissance and Baroque periods, and Bonheur's treatment of the subject brings her expertise in equine anatomy into contact with the fantastical. By 1850 she was becoming famous for The Horse Fair, which would be shown in 1853, and her reputation rested on the physical accuracy and energy of her horse paintings rather than on mythological or allegorical content. A Pegasus by Bonheur was therefore a specific kind of work — an equine subject rendered with the anatomical authority she brought to real horses, with the addition of wings as the single concession to myth. This combination of naturalist skill and mythological subject created a distinctive tension that made the work unusual within her production, and it may have been a private commission or personal experiment rather than a gallery submission.

The mythological horse is rendered with the same anatomical authority Bonheur applied to real horses, with the wings integrated into the body convincingly rather than appended as an afterthought. The canvas demonstrates that her equine expertise extended even to imaginary subjects rendered in her characteristic empirical idiom.