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French animalière and realist artist, one of few female sculptors. As a painter she became famous primarily for two chief works: Ploughing in the Nivernais, which was first exhibited at the Salon of 1848, and, The Horse Fair, which was exhibited at the Salon of 1853 (finished in 1855). Bonheur is widely considered to have been the most famous woman painter of the nineteenth century. Due to a tendency in 1980s-1990s academic criticism to locate Bonheur as a proto-Feminist and as a pivotal figure for Queer theory, she is perhaps most famous today because she was known for wearing men's clothing and living with women. This is ironic because, as a woman the practice that she devoted her working life to as an artist is now largely forgotten or dismissed as secondary in importance to her clothing, her female companions and her penchant for smoking cigarettes. She died at the age of 77. Many of her paintings, which had not previously been shown publicly, were sold at auction in Paris in 1900.
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