Cattle at Rest on a Hillside in the Alps

A herd of cattle lies resting on a hillside in the Alps, the quiet pastoral to which Rosa Bonheur, the most celebrated animal painter of the nineteenth century, returned again and again in her later years. By 1885, when she painted this canvas, Bonheur was an international celebrity — the first woman to receive the Grand Cross of the French Legion of Honor — and her studies of horses, cattle and sheep, built on close observation of anatomy and of animals in the landscape, had made animal painting a serious pursuit for a generation of followers. This picture was already in Chicago before the end of the century, lent to the Art Institute of Chicago by the collector Albert A. Munger from at least 1894, and it entered the permanent collection through his bequest in 1901. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.