In 1841, when Rosa was nineteen years old, she first experienced the pleasures, doubts, and fears attendant upon a public exhibition of one’s work.  Two small pictures, called “Goats and Sheep” and “Two Rabbits,” were hung at the Salon and were praised by critics and connoisseurs.  The next year she sent three others, “Animals in a Pasture,” “A Cow Lying in a Meadow,” and “A Horse for Sale.”  She continued to send pictures to the Salon and to some exhibitions in other cities, and received several bronze and silver medals.

In 1845 she sent twelve works to the Salon, accompanied by those of her father and her brother Auguste, who was admitted that year for the first time.  In 1848 Isidore was added to the list, exhibiting a picture and a group in marble, both representing “A Combat between a Lioness and an African Horseman.”  And, finally, the family contributions were completed when Juliette, now Madame Peyrol, added her pictures, and the works of the five artists were seen in the same Exhibition.

In 1849 Rosa Bonheur’s “Cantal Oxen” was awarded the gold medal, and was followed by “Ploughing in the Nivernais,” so well known the world over by engravings and photographs.  When the medal was assigned her, Horace Vernet proclaimed her triumph to a brilliant assemblage, and also presented to her a magnificent vase of Sevres porcelain, in the name of the French Government.  This placed her in the first rank of living artists, and the triumph was of double value to her on account of the happiness it afforded her father, to see this, his oldest child, of whose future he had often despaired, taking so eminent a place in the artistic world.

This year of success was also a year of sorrow, for before its end the old Raymond had died.  He had been for some time the director of the Government School of Design for Girls, and, being freed from pecuniary anxiety, he had worked with new courage and hope.  After her father’s death Rosa Bonheur exhibited nothing for two years, but in 1853 she brought out her “Horse Fair,” which added to her fame.

She was perfectly at home in the mountains, and spent much time in the huts of charcoal burners, huntsmen, or woodcutters, contented with the food they could give her and happy in her study.  Thus she made her sketches for “Morning in the Highlands,” “The Denizens of the Mountains,” etc.  She once lived six weeks with her party on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees, where they saw no one save muleteers going and coming, with their long lines of loaded mules.  Their only food was frogs’ legs, which they prepared themselves, and the black bread and curdled milk which the country afforded.  At evening the muleteers would amuse the strangers by dancing the national dances, and then repose in picturesque groups just suited to artistic sketching.  In Scotland and in Switzerland, as well as in various portions of her own country, she had similar experiences, and her “Hay-Making in Auvergne” proves