One day on returning home, at the end of his day's work, Raymond Bonheur discovered on the easel a little canvas representing a bunch of cherries, a well drawn canvas and excellently painted from nature. This was Rosa Bonheur's first painting; it bore witness to a genuine artistic temperament. Her father was delighted, but he hid his pleasure. "That is not so bad," he allowed to Rosa. "Work seriously, and you may become an artist." This word of encouragement set the young girl's heart to pulsing with emotion. Then it needed only application and courage? She felt within her an energy that nothing could rebuff and an ambition that nothing could quench. Rosa Bonheur had found her path. THE FIRST SUCCESSES Not long after this, a serious and determined young girl might be seen in the halls of the Louvre, copying with desperate energy the works of the great masters. She wore an eccentric costume, consisting of a sort of dolman with military frogs. It was young Rosa Bonheur serving her apprenticeship to art. The students and copyists who regularly frequented the museum, not knowing her name, had christened her "the little hussard." But the jests and criticisms flung out by passing strangers in regard to her work, far from discouraging her, only drove her to still more obstinate and persistent study. The hours which she did not consecrate to the Louvre, she spent in her father's studio, multiplying her sketches and anatomical studies. Even at this period she had already grasped instinctively the truth formulated by Ingres, that "honesty in art depends upon line-work." Few painters have so far insisted upon this honesty, this conscientiousness, without which the most gifted artist remains incomplete. Whatever gifts he may be endowed with by nature, talent cannot be improvised; it is the fruit of independent and sustained toil. Later on, when she in her turn became a teacher, Rosa Bonheur was able to proclaim the necessity of line-work with all the more authority because it had always been the fundamental basis, the very scaffolding of all her works. "It is the true grammar of art," she would affirm, "and the time thus spent cannot fail to be profitable in the future." [Illustration: PLATE III.--THE HORSE FAIR (National Gallery, London) This painting is considered by some critics to be Rosa Bonheur's masterpiece. There is no other painting of hers in which she attained the same degree of power, or the same degree of truth in individual expression. What naturalness, and what vigour in this drove of prancing horses, and what movement of those haunches straining under the effort of the muscles!] During this period of study, she was living in the Rue de la Bienfaisance; her father's mania for changing his residence dragged her successively to the Rue du Roule, and then to the Rue Rumford, in the level stretch of the Monceau quarter, where Raymond Bonheur, who had just remarried, installed his new household.