This picture shows the horse market held in Paris on the tree-lined boulevard de l'Hôpital, near the asylum of Salpêtrière, visible in the left background. For a year and a half, Bonheur went there twice a week to make sketches, dressed as a man to avoid attention. This work was shown in the Salon of 1853 and in 1854 in Bonheur's native Bordeaux, where the municipality refused to buy it for 12,000 francs. It was apparently retouched in 1855, the year it was sold to a London dealer for 40,000 francs.

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