Rosa Bonheur (born Marie-Rosalie Bonheur; 16 March 1822 – 25 May 1899) was a French painter, sculptor and animalier. Her paintings include Ploughing in the Nivernais, first exhibited at the Salon of 1849, and now in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, and The Horse Fair (in French: Le marché aux chevaux), 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 was widely considered to be the most famous female painter of the nineteenth century.Janson, H. W., Janson, Anthony F. History of Art. Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers. 6th edition. , page 674. She made sculptures in a realist style.
It has been said that Bonheur was openly lesbian, as she lived with her partner Nathalie Micas for over 40 years until Micas's death. After that she lived with American painter Anna Elizabeth Klumpke. However, others assert that nothing supports this speculation.
Early development and artistic training Bonheur was born on 16 March 1822 in Bordeaux, Gironde, the oldest child in a family of artists.Kuiper, Kathleen. "Rosa Bonheur", Encyclopædia Britannica Online, Retrieved 23 May 2015. Her mother was Sophie Bonheur (née Marquis), a piano teacher; she died when Rosa was eleven. Her father was Oscar-Raymond Bonheur, a landscape and portrait painter who encouraged his daughter's artistic talents. Though of Jewish origin, the Bonheur family adhered to Saint-Simonianism, a Christian socialist sect that promoted the education of women alongside men. Bonheur's siblings included the animal painters Auguste Bonheur and Juliette Bonheur, as well as the animal sculptor Isidore Jules Bonheur. Francis Galton used the Bonheurs as an example of the eponymous "Hereditary Genius" in his 1869 essay.Galton, Francis. Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into its Laws and Consequences. Second edition. (London: MacMillan and Co, 1892), p. 247. Original 1869.
Bonheur moved to Paris in 1828 at the age of six with her mother and siblings, after her father had gone ahead of them to establish a residence and income there. By family accounts, she had been an unruly child and had a difficult time learning to read, though she would sketch for hours at a time with pencil and paper before she learned to talk.Mackay, James, The Animaliers, E.P. Dutton, Inc., New York, 1973 Her mother taught her to read and write by asking her to choose and draw a different animal for each letter of the alphabet.Rosalia Shriver, Rosa Bonheur: With a Checklist of Works in American Collections (Philadelphia: Art Alliance Press, 1982) 2-12. (It must be said that, as a reference source, this book is itself riddled with inaccuracies and misattributions, but it accords with the consensus account on this matter.) The artist credited her love of drawing animals to these reading lessons with her mother.
At school, she was often disruptive and was expelled numerous times.Theodore Stanton, Reminiscences of Rosa Bonheur (New York: D. Appleton and company, 1910), Theodore Stanton, Reminiscences of Rosa Bonheur (London: Andrew Melrose, 1910). After a failed apprenticeship with a seamstress at the age of twelve, her father undertook her training as a painter. Her father allowed her to pursue her interest in painting animals by bringing live animals to the family's studio for studying.
Following the traditional art school curriculum of the period, Bonheur began her training by copying images from drawing books and by sketching plaster models. As her training progressed, she made studies of domesticated animals, including horses, sheep, cows, goats, rabbits, and other animals in the pastures around the perimeter of Paris, the open fields of Villiers near Levallois-Perret, and the still-wild Bois de Boulogne.Boime, Albert. "The Case of Rosa Bonheur: Why Should a Woman Want to be More Like a Man?", Art History v. 4, December 1981, p. 384-409. At fourteen, she began to copy paintings at the Louvre. Among her favorite painters were Nicolas Poussin and Peter Paul Rubens, though she also copied the paintings of Paulus Potter, Frans Pourbus the Younger, Louis Léopold Robert, Salvatore Rosa, and Karel Dujardin.
She studied animal anatomy and osteology in the abattoirs of Paris and dissected animals at the École nationale vétérinaire d'Alfort, the National Veterinary Institute in Paris.Wild Spirit: The Work of Rosa Bonheur by Jen Longshaw There, she prepared detailed studies that she later used as references for her paintings and sculptures. During this period, she befriended the father-and-son comparative anatomists and zoologists, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.Ashton, Dore and Denise Browne Hare. Rosa Bonheur: A Life and a Legend, (New York: Viking, 1981, 206pp.
Early success and development of career
Bonheur's first major success can be attributed to The Horse Fair, which was first displayed at the Paris Salon in 1853. The painting was started in 1851 and completed in 1855.Bonheur, Rosa, et al., editors. Rosa Bonheur - All Nature’s Children: Musée Des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux, 24 May - 29 August 1997; Musée de l’Ecole de Barbizon-Auberge Ganne, Barbizon, 19 September - 18 November 1997; Dahesh Museum, New York, 17 December 1997 - 21 February 1998. New York, 1998. It measures eight by sixteen feet (2.4 by 4.9 m), sketch for the London version; the sketch for the New York version is in the Ludwig Nissen Foundation, see: C. Steckner, in: Bilder aus der Neuen und Alten Welt. Die Sammlung des Diamantenhändlers Ludwig Nissen, 1993, p. 142 and spaeth.net and depicts the horse market held in Paris, on the tree-lined boulevard de l'Hôpital, near the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, which is visible in the painting's background. There is a reduced version that can be found in the National Gallery located in London.The Horse Fair, National Gallery Bonheur had been displaying her work at the Paris Salon for several years before displaying The Horse Fair, earning medals and smaller praise. This even resulted in the commissioning of Ploughing in the Nivernais from the state, which was exhibited in 1849 and is now on display in the Musée d'Orsay located in Paris. Due to The Horse Fair sparking debate and controversy among critics and collectors when it was first displayed at the Paris Salon, it allowed Bonheur to create a public image and insert herself into the international art world. One such debate was that Comte de Nieuwerkerke (1811 - 1892) implied that Bonheur had been commissioned by the state to create the work, though there is no known documentation to back said implication, and Bonheur herself went through the effort of discrediting it. In 1856, Bonheur traveled to England and Scotland with Micas, where she met Queen Victoria, John Ruskin, and other major British artists. In Scotland, she completed sketches and studies for later works such as Highland Shepherd, completed in 1859, The Highland Raid, completed in 1860, and other paintings. These pieces depicted a way of life in the Scottish Highlands that had disappeared a century earlier, and had an enormous appeal to Victorian sensibilities.
Bonheur exhibited her work at the Palace of Fine Arts and The Woman's Building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois. In 1889 and 1890, she developed a friendship with American sculptor Cyrus Dallin, who was studying in Paris. Together they travelled to Neuilly outside of Paris to sketch the animals and cast of Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show at their encampment. In 1890 Bonheur painted Cody on horseback. Dallin's work from this period, "A Signal of Peace" would also be displayed in Chicago in 1893 and be the first major step in his career.
Though she was more popular in England than in her native France, she was decorated with the French Legion of Honour by Empress Eugénie in 1865, and was promoted to Officer of the Order in 1894. She was the first female artist to be given this award.
Patronage and the market for her work Bonheur was represented by the art dealer Ernest Gambart (1814–1902). It is unknown when the two of them first met, but by 1854, the two were on close terms. Gambart served as a friend, sponsor, and promoter for Bonheur's work and went to great lengths to ensure her work would be pushed to wider audiences. By 1855, Gambart had bought The Horse Fair for forty thousand francs so that he could display the painting in an exhibition of French art located in England. Through this exhibition, Bonheur's work was recognized by several English critics, such as William Rossetti, who commented on it positively. Regardless of the positive attention that Bonheur's work gained, she still received backlash for the fact that she was a woman artist. But through The Horse Fair being displayed in England, even at one point being moved to Buckingham Palace for a brief time to be studied by Queen Victoria, it erased all doubts that Bonheur's work was made by herself and paved the way for her success.
Many engravings of Bonheur's work were created from reproductions by Charles George Lewis (1808–1880), one of the finest engravers of the day.
In 1859, her success enabled her to move to the Château de By near Fontainebleau, not far from Paris, where she lived for the rest of her life. The house is now a museum dedicated to her.
Personal life and legacy Women were often only reluctantly educated as artists in Bonheur's day, and by becoming such a successful artist she helped to open doors to the women artists who followed her.
Bonheur was known for wearing men's clothing;Britta C. Dwyer, "Bridging the gap of difference: Anna Klumpke's "union" with Rosa Bonheur", Out of context. (New York: Greenwood Press, 2004), p. 69-79.; Laurel Lampela, "Daring to be different: a look at three lesbian artists", Art Education v.54 no. 2 (March 2001), p. 45-51. and Gretchen Van Slyke, "The sexual and textual politics of dress: Rosa Bonheur and her cross-dressing permits", Nineteenth-Century French Studies v. 26 no. 3-4 (Spring/Summer 1998) p. 321-35. she attributed her choice of trousers to their practicality for working with animals (see Rational dress).Janson: History of Art, page 929
She lived with her first partner, Nathalie Micas, for over 40 years until Micas' death, and later began a relationship with the American painter Anna Elizabeth Klumpke. At a time when lesbianism was regarded as animalistic and deranged by most French officials, Bonheur's outspokenness about her personal life was groundbreaking.
In a world where gender expression was policed, Bonheur broke boundaries by deciding to wear trousers, shirts, and ties, although not in her painted portraits or posed photographs. She did not do this because she wanted to be a man, though she occasionally referred to herself as a grandson or brother when talking about her family; rather, she identified with the power and freedom reserved for men. It also broadcast her sexuality at a time when the lesbian stereotype consisted of women who cut their hair short, wore trousers, and chain-smoked. Rosa Bonheur did all three. Bonheur never explicitly said she was a lesbian, but her lifestyle and the way she talked about her female partners suggest this.Zimmerman, Bonnie (2013). Encyclopedia of Lesbian Histories and Cultures. Hoboken: Taylor & Francis. p. 125. . Bonheur, while taking pleasure in activities usually reserved for men (such as hunting and smoking), viewed her womanhood as something far superior to anything a man could offer or experience. She viewed men as stupid and mentioned that the only males she had time or attention for were the bulls she painted.