Mountains with Mist

With these images of mountains, wetlands, valleys, and fields, Bonheur demonstrates his keen interest in diverse topographies and atmospheric effects. The artist traveled widely throughout France in the 1850s with his sister Rosa, a prominent painter of animal subjects. Bonheur noted the sites in the Pyrenees Mountains and Auvergne on labels that he glued to the bottom corners of his sketches and used these identifications later, to prompt his memory while working on more formal exhibition pictures. Tiny holes in the corners of the sketches suggest that Bonheur pinned his sheets of paper to a board in order to paint.