Google Doodle pays tribute to French painter Rosa Bonheur on 200th birth anniversary

It is French painter Rosa Bonheur’s 200th birth anniversary today, March 16 and Google Doodle paid a tribute to her with an animated figurine of Rosa Bonheur painting a flock of sheep on canvas.

Bonheur was born on 16 March 1822 in Bordeaux, Gironde, the oldest child in a family of artists. Her mother, Sophie Bonheur was a piano teacher and her father Oscar-Raymond Bonheur, was a landscape and portrait painter who encouraged his daughter's artistic talents.

Bonheur was mostly a painter of animals but also a sculptor, in a realist style. Her paintings include Ploughing in the Nivernais, first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1848, and now at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, and The Horse Fair (in French: Le marché aux chevaux), which was exhibited at the Salon of 1853 (finished in 1855) and is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City. Bonheur was widely considered to be the most famous female painter of the nineteenth century.

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In 1853, Bonheur garnered international acclaim with her painting “The Horse Fair,” which depicted the horse market held in Paris. As her most well-known work, this painting remains on exhibit in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.