Having accepted an invitation from Rosa Bonheur to visit her at her elegant chateau, Buffalo Bill in turn extended the hospitalities of his camp to the famous artist, who day after day visited it and made studies for her pleasure, giving much time to sittings for a painting of Colonel Cody.
The result was the superb painting that attracted so much comment abroad, and which she presented to the great frontiersman, who prizes it above all the souvenirs he has in his charming home at North Platte, where it holds the place of honor.
The painting represents Buffalo Bill mounted upon his favorite horse, and it is needless to say that where both man and animal are portraits, it is a work of art coming from such a hand as that of Rosa Bonheur. The fact of uniting man and beast in a painting, giving each equal prominence, was never before done, I believe, by this great artist, yet her hand did not lose its cunning in departing from the rule of her life, as all can testify who have seen this superb picture.
INDIANS UNDER THE SHADOW OF ST. PETER’S, ROME.
With America as a vast and grand field for the brushes of English and European artists, there is little doubt that hereafter the foreign academies will possess many works on American scenes and characters; and with the example thus set them our own artists will find in their own country material enough to prevent their going to other lands to get artistic inspiration.
After a short tour in the south of France in the fall, a vessel was chartered at Marseilles, the Mediterranean crossed at Barcelona, landing the first band of Americans with accompanying associates, scouts, cowboys, Mexican horses of Spanish descent, and wild buffaloes, etc., on the very spot where on his return to Spain landed the world’s greatest explorer Christopher Columbus. Here the patrons were demonstratively eulogistic, the exhibition seeming to delight them greatly, savoring as it did of an addenda to their national history; recalling after a lapse of 400 years the resplendent glories of Spanish conquests under Ferdinand and Isabella, of the sainted hero Cristobal Colon (1492), Columbus in America (1890), “Buffalo Bill” and the native American in Spain!
Recrossing the Mediterranean via Corsica and Sardinia (encountering a tremendous storm), Naples (the placid waters of whose noble bay gave a welcome refuge) was reached, and in the shadow of old Vesuvius, which in fact formed a superbly grand scenic background, another peg in history was pinned by the visit of the cowboy and Indian to the various noted localities that here abound; the ruins of Herculaneum, Pompeii, and the great crater of “the burning mountain” striking wonder and awe as well as giving geological and geographical knowledge to the stoical “red man.”
Then the “famed of the famous cities” of the world, Rome, was next visited, to be conquered through the gentle power of intellectual interest in, and the reciprocal pleasure exchanged by, its unusual visitors; the honor being given to “the outfit,” as an organization, of attending a dazzling fête given in the Vatican by his holiness Pope Leo XIII., and of receiving the exalted pontiff’s blessing. The grandeur of the spectacle, the heavenly music, the entrancing singing, and impressive adjuncts produced a most profound impression on the astonished children of the prairie. The Wild West in the Vatican!