“The meeting between Rosa Bonheur and Buffalo Bill, two freedom-loving beings, caused a short circuit in my mind.”

I have always enjoyed seeing Rosa Bonheur's paintings within the walls of the Musée d'Orsay. They are familiar to me, and I have long maintained a distant and polite relationship with them. What tempered my enthusiasm was that they seemed to me to be limited to the representation of immutable cattle in eternal France.

I also knew a little about Rosa Bonheur's life, her personality, her loves and friendships. And I couldn't make the connection between the animals depicted and Rosa's audacity. At least not in a lasting and sincere way. The woman and the artist thus walked side by side, without holding hands.

No matter how many times I tried with all the animals in creation, nothing worked. Neither his lions, his deer, his sheep, nor his cats really touched me. Only the look of his little fox had come close to taming me.

But it only took me discovering the artist's connection with Buffalo Bill for everything to fall into place in my mind. Natacha Henry, in the book she devoted to their "admirable friendship" (Robert Laffont, 2019), tells how the famous French painter and the man of the Wild West who decimated so many creatures, William Cody by his real name, met in 1889. They became friends. They shared their passion for animals. She painted the animals that had crossed the Atlantic with him for his Wild West Show . She also painted his portrait.

Once I had finished reading, the oxen of old Europe began to communicate with the bison of the New World. Rosa Bonheur's painting now took a tangent, freed itself from the age-old history of the yoke, the shoulder collar and other celebrities of old history books. She emerged from the nets of the ad hoc lexical fields to which her subjects seemed assigned: those of the bucolic (rough pastoral, rural, eclogue, pasture, birdsong); of the forest (clearing, deer, hunting, poacher, bellow); of plowing and breeding (comice, sharecropper, soil, ploughshare, pasture, udder, plough, plow).

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