I put my grooming brushes aside and grabbed my saddle and bridle, tacking up inside the stall before leading Claude out into the cobbled courtyard of the mews and mounting up there. Then I rode him to the Bayswater Road and stood at the lights and waited for the pedestrian signal to bleep so we could cross. Claude’s years on the streets of Paris mean that he is the perfect city horse. Even the red double-decker buses here don’t make him bat an eyelid. The other day there was a brass band in the park and some protestors with placards, and he just strolled along through it all like a superstar. He makes me feel so safe on his back. And I’m learning to ride. I can rise to the trot, and I can even canter now. You’re not supposed to in the park, but at this hour when there are no other riders on the tracks I’ve been practising.

We reach the bridle path that passes the Serpentine and I think of all those people inside the gallery, the bourgeoisie of London, raising their champagne flutes and talking about art and being fabulous. And I know there is no place I would rather be right now than here with my best friend. And I take up the reins and I close my legs and sit tall and look to the horizon, and I canter on.

Epilogue

In New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue, in Gallery 812, you will find one of the most famous paintings of the nineteenth century and the only important painting of this era by a woman – The Horse Fair by Rosa Bonheur.

It took Rosa Bonheur almost two years to create her masterpiece, and her commitment to being an artist, despite the extreme sexism towards women painters at the time, marks her out as one of feminism’s greatest trailblazers.

Determined to create her art, Bonheur took to dressing as a man to avoid attention when she frequented the abattoirs of Paris, and made her twice weekly visits to the horse markets that took place in the boulevard de l’Hôpital, near the asylum of Salpêtrière. Here, she began to work up her sketches of the horses, the heavy draught Percherons and Boulonnaises and Selle Français, figuring out her plan and mapping out the proportions of her gigantic masterpiece that would end up measuring two and a half metres in height and over five metres in length.