Col. William F. Cody

Rosa Bonheur's portrait of Colonel William F. Cody — 'Buffalo Bill' — belongs to the remarkable encounter between the French master of animal painting and the American showman whose Wild West exhibition toured Europe beginning in 1889. Bonheur visited the show's Paris engagement with intense enthusiasm, sketching and painting the performers, horses, and Native American participants with the same documentary intensity she brought to livestock fairs and cavalry reviews. Cody sat for this portrait and developed a friendship with Bonheur that resulted in several paintings. The portrait presents Cody as the frontier hero he cultivated in his public persona — buckskin-clad, commanding.

Bonheur renders Cody with the confident equestrian portraiture she had developed over decades — the figure's relationship to his horse and the Western landscape behind him establishing the heroic Western identity Cody performed for European audiences. Her characteristic attention to costume detail — the buckskin, hat, and accoutrements — serves the documentary function of Orientalist-adjacent recording of an exotic (in French eyes) American type.