Rosa Bonheur

Rosa Bonheur
Photograph of Rosa Bonheur (1880-90) in the garden of her Château at By
Birth name	Marie-Rosalie Bonheur
Born	(1822-03-16)16 March 1822 Bordeaux, France
Died	25 May 1899(1899-05-25) (aged 77) Thomery (By), France
Nationality	French
Field	Painting, Sculpture
Movement	Realism
Works	Ploughing in the Nivernais, The Horse Fair

Rosa Bonheur, born Marie-Rosalie Bonheur, (16 March 1822 – 25 May 1899) was a French animalière, realist artist, and sculptor. As a painter she became famous primarily for two chief works: Ploughing in the Nivernais (in French: Le labourage nivernais, le sombrage),^[2] which was first exhibited at the Salon of 1848, and is now in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, depicts a team of oxen ploughing a field while attended by peasants set against a vast pastoral landscape; and, The Horse Fair (in French: Le marché aux chevaux)^[3] (which was exhibited at the Salon of 1853 (finished in 1855) and is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City. Bonheur is widely considered to have been the most famous female painter of the nineteenth century.^[4]

Early development and artistic training

Bonheur was born in Bordeaux, Gironde, the oldest child in a family of artists. Her father Oscar-Raymond Bonheur was a landscape and portrait painter who became a friend of Francisco Goya when Goya was living in exile in Bordeaux in the 1820s. Oscar-Raymond was an early adherent of Saint-Simonianism, a Christian-socialist sect that promoted the education of women alongside men. The Saint-Simonians also prophesied the coming of a female messiah. Her mother Sophie (née Marquis) who died when Rosa Bonheur was only eleven, had been a piano teacher. Bonheur's younger siblings included the animal painters Auguste Bonheur and Juliette Bonheur and the animal sculptor Isidore Jules Bonheur. That the Bonheur family was renowned as a family of artists is attested to by the fact that Francis Galton, the cousin of Charles Darwin used the Bonheurs as an example of "Hereditary Genius" in his 1869 essay of the same title.^[5]

Bonheur moved to Paris in 1828 at the age of six with her mother and brothers, her father having gone ahead of them to establish a residence and income. By family accounts, she had been an unruly child and had a difficult time learning to read. To remedy this her mother taught her to read and write by having her select and draw an animal for each letter of the alphabet.^[6] To this practice in the company of her doting mother she attributed her love of drawing animals.

Edouard Louis Dubufe, Portrait of Rosa Bonheur 1857, which shows the artist with a bull, symbolic of her work as a painter of animals, or Animalière.

Bonheur' Study of a Cow. Courtesy Figge Art Museum.

Although she was sent to school like her brothers, she was a disruptive force in the classroom and expelled from numerous schools.^[7] Finally, after trying to apprentice her to a seamstress Raimond agreed to take her education as a painter upon himself. She was twelve at that point and would have been too young to attend the École des Beaux-Arts even if they had accepted women.

As was traditional in the art schools of the period, Bonheur began her artistic training by copying images from drawing books and by sketching from plaster models. As her training progressed she began to make studies of domesticated animals from life, to include horses, sheep, cows, goats, rabbits and other animals in the pastures on the perimeter of Paris, the open fields of Villiers and the (then) still-wild Bois de Boulogne. At age fourteen she began to copy from paintings at the Louvre. Among her favorite painters were Nicholas Poussin and Peter Paul Rubens, but she also copied the paintings of Paulus Potter, Porbus, Louis Léopold Robert, Salvatore Rosa and Karel Dujardin.^[8]

She also studied animal anatomy and osteology by visiting the abattoirs of Paris and by performing dissections of animals at the École nationale vétérinaire d'Alfort, the National Veterinary Institute in Paris.^[9] There she prepared detailed studies which she would later use as references for her paintings and sculptures. During this period, too, she also met and became friends with the father and son comparative anatomists and zoologists Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire by whom her father was employed to create natural history illustrations.^[10]

Early success

The Horse Fair, 1853-1855. The original hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Rosa Bonheur received a French government commission which led to her first great success, Ploughing in the Nivernais, exhibited in 1849. Her most famous work was the monumental Horse Fair, completed in 1855, which measured eight feet high by sixteen feet wide.^[11] Its subject is the horse market held in Paris on the tree-lined boulevard de l’Hôpital, near the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, visible in the background on the left. It led to international fame and recognition and that same year she travelled to Scotland, "en route" meeting Queen Victoria, who admired her work, and where she completed sketches for later works including A Scottish Raid, completed in 1860, and Highland Shepherd. These were anachronistic pieces as they depicted a way of life in the Scottish highlands that had disappeared a century earlier. Nonetheless, they had enormous appeal to Victorian sensibilities. She was especially popular in England, though less so in her native France. In France she was decorated with the Legion of Honour by the Empress Eugenie in 1865 and was promoted to officer of the order.

Patronage and the market for her work

She was represented by private art galleries, and in particular that of Ernest Gambart (1814–1902), who would purchase the reproduction rights to her work and sell engraved copies of her paintings. It was Gambart who brought Bonheur to the United Kingdom in 1855.^[12] Many engravings were created by Charles George Lewis (1808–1880), one of the finest engravers of his day. Gambart sold through his gallery in London's Pall Mall.

Legacy

Rosa Bonheur's atelier in Château de By, Thomery, is a museum showing the place where she worked during the last 40 years of her life.^[1]

Due to a tendency in 1980s-1990s academic criticism to locate Bonheur as a proto-Feminist and as a pivotal figure for Queer theory, she is perhaps most famous today because she was known for wearing men's clothing and living together with Anna Klumpke. Her work and artistic talent has now become somewhat secondary in importance to her manner of dress, her choice of companions and her penchant for smoking cigarettes.^[13] On her wearing of trousers, she said at the time that her choice of attire was simply practical as it facilitated her work with animals: "I was forced to recognize that the clothing of my sex was a constant bother. That is why I decided to solicit the authorization to wear men's clothing from the prefect of police. But the suit I wear is my work attire, and nothing else. The epithets of imbeciles have never bothered me...." ^[14] She lived for over forty years with her childhood friend Nathalie Micas. In the final year of her life she became close with Anna Klumpke, the author of her "autobiography".

She died at the age of 77, at Thomery (By), France. Many of her paintings, which had not previously been shown publicly, were sold at auction in Paris in 1900.^[15]

Biographical works

Weaning the Calves, 1879

While there are many sources of biographical information about Rosa Bonheur, there are three primary texts which are most consulted and cited in the subsequent literature; the first is a pamphlet written by Eugène de Mirecourt, Les Contemporains: Rosa Bonheur which appeared in 1856 just after her Salon success with The Horse Fair.^[16] When, in 1897, Venancio Deslandes came across a copy of this pamphlet he sent it to Bonheur with a request that she might tell him if it were accurate.^[17] This document, corrected and annotated by Rosa Bonheur herself is a key primary biographical source. The second account was written by Anna Klumpke, an American painter from Boston who made Bonheur’s acquaintance in 1887 while serving as a translator for an American collector of her work and who later became the older artist’s companion in the last year of her life. This account, published in 1909 as Rosa Bonheur: sa vie, son oeuvre was translated in 1997 by Gretchen Van Slyke and published as Rosa Bonheur: The Artist's (Auto)biography, so-named because Klumpke had used Bonheur’s first-person voice.^[18] The third, and most authoritative work is Reminiscences of Rosa Bonheur, edited by Theodore Stanton (the son of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the American feminist), and published simultaneously in London and New York in 1910. This volume includes numerous correspondences between Bonheur and her family and friends, subsequently lending the deepest insight into the artist’s life, as well as her understanding of her own art-making practices and the art world in general. The volume is arranged in a loosely chronological fashion, except when letters and reviews are grouped by correspondent or critic.^[19]

See also

External video

Bonheur's Plowing in the Nivernais, Smarthistory[20]

Bonheur's Sheep in the Highlands, Smarthistory[21]

• Women artists
• Rosa Bonheur Memorial Park

Notes

The following footnotes cite references, below.

References

Further reading

• Dore Ashton, Rosa Bonheur: A Life and a Legend. Illustrations and Captions by Denise Browne Harethe. New York: A Studio Book/The Viking Press, 1981 NYT Review

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Rosa Bonheur.

• 20 Paintings by Rosa Bonheur at the BBC Your Paintings site
• Rosa Bonheur - Artcyclopedia search
• Rosa Bonheur - Rehs Galleries' biographical information and an image of her painting Couching Lion, 1872
• Rosa Bonheur Plowing in the Nivernais (1849). A video discussion about the painting from smarthistory.khanacademy.org
• Art and the empire city: New York, 1825-1861, an exhibition catalog from The Metropolitan Museum of Art (fully available online as PDF), which contains material on Bonheur (see index)