Rosa Bonheur

Early development and artistic training

Bonheur was born on 16 March 1822 in Bordeaux, Gironde, the oldest child in a family of artists. 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.

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. Her mother taught her to read and write by asking her to choose and draw a different animal for each letter of the alphabet. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. It measures eight by sixteen feet (2.4 by 4.9 m) 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. 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.[[Image:Rosa Bonheur with Bull , by E L Dubufe.jpg|thumb|left|[[Edouard Louis Dubufe]], Portrait of Rosa Bonheur 1857. Symbolic of her work as an Animalière, the bull was painted by Bonheur herself.]]

Patronage and the market for her work

Bonheur was represented by the art dealer Ernest Gambart (1814–1902). It's 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; she attributed her choice of trousers to their practicality for working with animals (see Rational dress).

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. 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.

From 1800 until 2013, women in Paris, France, were technically forbidden from wearing trousers without permission from the police, with only a few exceptions. Enforcement of this largely stopped during World War I and afterward, but in Bonheur's time, it was still an issue. In the 1850s, Bonheur had to ask permission from the police to wear trousers, as this was her preferred attire to go to the sheep and cattle markets to study the animals she painted.

Having chosen to never become an adjunct or appendage to a man in terms of painting, she decided she would be her own boss and that she would lean on herself and her female partners instead. She had her partners focus on the home life while she took on the role of breadwinner by concentrating on her painting. Bonheur's legacy paved the way for other lesbian artists who didn't favour the life society had laid out for them.

Bonheur died on 25 May 1899, at the age of 77, at Thomery (By), France. She was buried together with Nathalie Micas (1824 – 24 June 1889), her lifelong companion and lover, at Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris. Klumpke was Bonheur's sole heir after her death, and later joined Micas and Bonheur in the same cemetery upon her death. Bonheur, Micas, and Klumpke's collective tombstone reads, "Friendship is divine affection". Many of her paintings, which had not previously been shown publicly, were sold at auction in Paris in 1900.

Along with other realist painters of the 19th century, for much of the 20th century Bonheur fell from fashion, and in 1978 a critic described Ploughing in the Nivernais as "entirely forgotten and rarely dragged out from oblivion"; however, that same year it was part of a series of paintings sent to China by the French government for an exhibition titled "The French Landscape and Peasant, 1820–1905". Since then, her reputation has been somewhat revived.

Rosa Bonheur Memorial Park is a pet cemetery located in Elkridge, Maryland, established in 1935, and actively operated until 2002.

Art historian Linda Nochlin’s 1971 essay Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?, considered a pioneering essay for both feminist art history and feminist art theory, contains a section about and titled "Rosa Bonheur."

One of Bonheur's works, Monarchs of the Forest, sold at auction in 2008 for just over $200,000.

In homage to the painter, four Parisian guinguettes bear the name Rosa Bonheur. The first opened in 2008 in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont. It is mentioned at length by Virginie Despentes in her series of novels, Vernon Subutex. The second in 2014 on the banks of the Seine at the Port des Invalides, the third in 2017 in Asnières-sur-Seine, and the fourth in 2021 in the Bois de Vincennes, home of the Rosa Bonheur Modern Team (RBMT) of various sports teams and a pep band. Each of the four locations of Rosa Bonheur is home to a multilingual pop choir, collectively known as "Viens Chanter Bonheur," which is led by musician and ceramic artist Damien Bousquet.

On 16 March 2022, Google honoured Bonheur with a Doodle to mark the bicentennial of her birth. The Doodle reached five countries: the United States, Ireland, France, Iceland and India.

Biographical works

The first biography of Bonheur was published during her lifetime: a pamphlet written by Eugène de Mirecourt, Les Contemporains: Rosa Bonheur, which appeared just after her Salon success with The Horse Fair in 1856. Bonheur later corrected and annotated this document.

The 1905 book Women Painters of the World (assembled and edited by Walter Shaw Sparrow) was subtitled "from the time of Caterina Vigri, 1413–1463, to Rosa Bonheur and the present day".

The second account was written by Anna Klumpke, Bonheur's companion in the last year of her life. Klumpke's biography, 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.

Reminiscences of Rosa Bonheur, edited by Theodore Stanton (the son of Elizabeth Cady Stanton), was published in London and New York in 1910. It includes numerous correspondences between Bonheur and her family and friends, in which she describes her art-making practices.

List of works

• Ploughing in the Nivernais, 1849
• The Horse Fair, 1852–1855
• Haymaking in the Auvergne, 1853–1855
• The Highland Shepherd, 1859
• A Family of Deer, 1865
• Changing meadows (Changement de pâturages), 1868
• Spanish muleteers crossing the Pyrenees (Muletiers espagnols traversent les Pyrénées), 1875
• Weaning the Calves, 1879
• Relay Hunting, 1887
• Portrait of William F. Cody, 1889
• The Monarch of the herd, 1868

Gallery

File:Rosa Bonheur - Changement de pâturages.jpg|Changement de pâturages (1863), Hamburger Kunsthalle File:Noon Day Rest by Rosa Bonheur - Rosa Bonheur - ABDAG002173.jpg|alt=Two cows and a horse standing in the shade of a tree in a field. More seated cows in the background|Noon Day Rest (1877), Aberdeen Art Gallery File:The Pyrenees - Rosa Bonheur - ABDAG002181.jpg|alt=Mountainous landscape with a seated man and two donkeys|The Pyrenees (1879), Aberdeen Art Gallery File:The Charcoal Burners - Rosa Bonheur - ABDAG002621.jpg|The Charcoal Burners (1853), Aberdeen Art Gallery File:A Stag, by Rosa Bonheur.jpg|A Stag (1893), National Gallery of Ireland

References

Resources

• NMWA.org Collection Profile - Bonheur article and artwork at NMWA.

References

1. (2007). "The Annotated Mona Lisa: A Crash Course in Art History from Prehistoric to Post-Modern". Andrews McMeel Publishing.
2. (25 March 2009). "Musée d'Orsay: Rosa Bonheur Labourage nivernais". musee-orsay.fr.
3. "Rosa Bonheur | The Horse Fair".
4. Janson, H. W., Janson, Anthony F. ''History of Art''. Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers. 6th edition. {{ISBN. 0-13-182895-9, page 674.
5. (2019-08-30). "14 Famous Female Painters Every Art Lover Should Know".
6. (2022-10-17). "Rich, Famous and Then Forgotten: The Art of Rosa Bonheur".
7. Kuiper, Kathleen. [http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/73033/Rosa-Bonheur "Rosa Bonheur"], ''Encyclopædia Britannica Online'', Retrieved 23 May 2015.
8. (9 August 2023). "[[Grove Art Online]]".
9. Bus, Lawrence. (24 May 2016). "The Realism of Rosa Bonheur". Jewish Currents.
10. Galton, Francis. ''Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into its Laws and Consequences''. Second edition. (London: MacMillan and Co, 1892), p. 247. Original 1869.
11. Mackay, James, ''The Animaliers'', E.P. Dutton, Inc., New York, 1973
12. 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.)
13. Klumpke, Anna. (2001). "Rosa Bonheur: The Artist's [Auto] Biography". [[The University of Michigan Press]].
14. Theodore Stanton, Reminiscences of Rosa Bonheur (New York: D. Appleton and company, 1910), Theodore Stanton, Reminiscences of Rosa Bonheur (London: Andrew Melrose, 1910).
15. (1997). "Dictionary of Women Artists". Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers.
16. [[Albert Boime. Boime, Albert]]. [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8365.1981.tb00733.x/abstract "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.
17. [https://web.archive.org/web/20060318082250/http://www.passionforpaint.com/RosaBonheur.html ''Wild Spirit: The Work of Rosa Bonheur''] by Jen Longshaw
18. Ashton, Dore and Denise Browne Hare. ''Rosa Bonheur: A Life and a Legend'', (New York: Viking, 1981, 206pp.
19. 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.
20. (10 October 2004). "''The Horse Fair'' at Albright Knox Gallery".
21. [https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/rosa-bonheur-the-horse-fair ''The Horse Fair''], National Gallery
22. "Rosa Bonheur: ''Labourage nivernais''". [[Musée d'Orsay]].
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29. "Ernest Gambart". goodallartists.ca.
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31. 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.
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34. (2000). "Encyclopedia of Lesbian and Gay Histories and Cultures: An Encyclopedia. Gay histories and cultures. Vol. 2". Taylor & Francis.
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40. France, Connexion. "Women wearing trousers was illegal in France until 2013".
41. (2001). "Daring to Be Different: A Look at Three Lesbian Artists". Art Education.
42. "The late Rosa Bonheur's relatives have been defeated in their contest over the great painter's will. It will be remembered that Miss Klumpke, the artist, was the legatee, and the courts have decided largely in her favor, all of the property, except the paintings, being awarded her, while the proceeds of the paintings, which are to be sold at auction, are to be equally divided between Miss Klumpke and the relatives." "Foreign Notes," [https://books.google.com/books?id=KqsaAAAAYAAJ ''Mark Hopkins Institute Review of Art''], Sept. 1900, vol. 1 no. 2, p. 17.
43. "The eight women artists of The National Gallery {{!}} Art UK".
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45. Galerie Georges Petit. 1er. Tome, « Catalogue des tableaux par Rosa Bonheur », 30 mai-2 juin 1900. 2eme Tome, ''Aquarelles, dessins, gravures par Rosa Bonheur'', 5–8 June 1900.
46. Muratova, Xenia. (1978). "Current and Forthcoming Exhibitions: Paris and China". [[The Burlington Magazine]].
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51. [[Eugène de Mirecourt]], ''Les Contemporains: Rosa Bonheur'' (Paris: Gustave Havard, 15 Rue Guénégaud, 1856) 20.
52. Anna Klumpke, ''Rosa Bonheur: Sa Vie, Son Oeuvre'', (Paris: E. Flammarion, 1909), Anna Klumpke, ''Rosa Bonheur: The Artist's (Auto)Biography'', trans. Gretchen Van Slyke (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998).
53. Theodore Stanton, ''Reminiscences of Rosa Bonheur'', (New York: D. Appleton and company, 1910), Theodore Stanton, ''Reminiscences of Rosa Bonheur'', (London: Andrew Melrose, 1910).