The cattle on the high pasture

The girl came up over the ridge with the salt bag and stopped, because the black one was looking at her.

He lay in the middle of the slope with his legs folded under him and his great shoulders settled into the grass, a dark grey hulk dappled with paler spots like lichen on a stone. His head was up. A little white showed at the corner of his eye. He was chewing, and he went on chewing, and he did not get up, which meant he had decided she was not worth getting up for. Behind him the red cow lay pressed against his flank, her long horns curving up and outward, her eyes half closed. Farther off, the third one, smaller and redder, had lain down among the alpenrose with only her head and horns above the pink bushes.

Nobody else on the mountain. The rest of the herd had drifted over the shoulder of the hill. The grass here was short and starred with little white and yellow flowers, and the ground was soft from rain. Out of the clouds to the right, a peak she had only seen twice all summer had come loose from its fog, its snowfields stained pink by the late light, hanging there like something that might be taken back.

She did not shake the bag. She sat on a rock and waited for the black one to finish thinking about her.

That girl is not in the painting. Rosa Bonheur left her out. The canvas belongs to three animals at rest, a lot of grass, and a mountain half returned from the clouds. Bonheur was among the most celebrated animal painters of nineteenth-century France, and she studied cattle and horses with the attention other painters gave to sitters for portraits. You can see it in the weight of the black animal pressing into the ground, the slope of his hindquarters, the pale foreleg folded under him.

The painting has belonged to the Art Institute since 1901, and was on view there as early as 1894. She signed it at the lower left, “Rosa Bonheur 1885,” small and low, down in the grass at the animals’ own height.

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