Rosa Bonheur was one of the most famous French artists of the nineteenth century, renowned for her paintings of animals both domestic (horses, oxen, sheep) and wild (lions, boars, bison).  The Paris Salon awarded  her a gold medal at twenty- six, and she was the first female artist to receive the Legion of Honor.  Her reputation stirred Cornelius Vanderbilt II to donate her monumental masterpiece, "The Horse Fair", to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  This course will discuss her extraordinary life- surrounded by the menagerie she kept at her country house- and the works inspired by her respect for animals.