Auguste Bonheur has dared – and it is great audacity – to unvarnish nature, to take away the smoke and the dirt, to wash off the bitumen sauce with which art ordinarily covers it, and he has painted it as he sees it. His animals have the soft and satin-like skin of well-to-do animals; his foliage, the bright freshness of plants washed by the rain and dried by the sun. Théophile Gaultier, Abécédaire du Salon, 1861
Bonheur’s oeuvre favoured the depiction of rural subject matters resulting from the direct observation of nature. This trend emerged in France in the 1840s in the works of Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) and Jean-François Millet (1814-1875). In his compositions he accurately depicted the horizon, ambience, light and space. His paintings were influenced of the paintings of cattle by seventeenth-century Dutch painters
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