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signed and dated Rosa Bonheur 1857 lower right - - oil on canvas 46 1/8 x 79 in. (117.2 x 200 cm.) PROVENANCE E. Gambert, London; sale, Christie's, May 3-4, 1861, lot 276 (L1,995) Pennell Knowles Thomas Walker, Berkswell Hall, Warwickshire; sale, Christie's, June 2, 1888, lot 69 (L3,780) Thomas Agnew & Sons, London Possibly Albert Brassey, 1890 Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge; sale, Parke-Bernet, New York, May 14, 1976, lot 29 EXHIBITED Paris, Exposition Universelle, 1867 Possibly London, Whitechapel (St. Judes), 1890, no. 21 LITERATURE A. Klumpke, Rosa Bonheur, Paris, 1908, p. 424 (illustrated p. 201 as Bourriquaires Traversant les Pyrenees) The year 1857 was a pivotal year for Rosa Bonheur. It saw the sale by her dealer Gambart of her renowned painting The Horse Fair to the American collector William P. Wright and also the completion of Spanish Muleteers Crossing the Pyrenees. In 1853 Bonheur had traveled with her lifelong friend Nathalie Micas to the South of France in celebration of the success she had received at the Salon that year for The Horse Fair. It was their second journey to the Pyrenees as they had spent four months there in 1850 on a working holiday. The two women spent the months of August and September wandering through the remote regions of the mountains where they encountered the smugglers and herdsmen who inhabited that remote and untouched region. Bonheur recorded her experiences in her various paintings over the years: Moutons aux Pyrenees (1870, ex-Collection M. Knoedler), Berger des Pyrenees (1864, Musee Conde, Chantilly) and in portraits of the smugglers she met along the way. In Spanish Muleteers Crossing the Pyrenees Bonheur adeptly demonstrates her ability to record the movements of the animals and muleteers within their rugged environs.