Rosa Bonheur's Château de By
Is becoming Musée de l'atelier Rosa Bonheur
Is becoming Musée de l'atelier Rosa Bonheur
Rosa Bonheur (1822–1899), born in rural Bordeaux, soon moved with her family to Paris. But her father left his wife and 4 children to live with a Christian utopian sect which promoted the equality of women and workers. Bonheur’s mother taught piano and sewing to earn money, but died when Rosa was young. The family struggled so artist-dad Raymond came home. He strongly urged Rosa to be independence in her art career.
Note the timing. Bonheur began sketching farm animals before primary school! From her days in a squishy Bordeaux flat, she assembled a small zoo, exercised in the local park. Later in Paris, she got permission to regularly sketch in a city abattoir. So her animals really looked alive, almost with their stink coming off the canvas.
Her personal art preferences luckily synchronised with France’s contemporary style. With the rise of the bourgeoisie instead of a cultivated aristocracy, smaller paintings of every-day subjects rather than grand mythological or religious scenes, were in demand! Artists looking for quick financial security turned to landscapes and animal paintings! Bonheur was already a master!
She continued her art education as a teenager, copying paintings at the Louvre with dad and studying living animal anatomy. At 19 she exhibited paintings of rabbits, goats and sheep at the 1841 Paris Salon, not attracting enough attention. But the young artist had established herself in French culture by 1845. See a lively landscape with farm animals, Ploughing in Nivernais/Nevers (1849), for example.
1849, Wiki
An upcoming exhibition at Musée d'Orsay Paris will be the first full show dedicated to Bonheur. See for example an early Bonheur masterpiece Ploughing that showed two teams of oxen turning the soil one autumn afternoon. The animals were monumental, yet each muscle showed the precision of a biology diagram. Kathryn Hughes wrote that the scene was bathed in a light just like C17th Dutch art, especially Bonheur’s favourite animalier, Dutchman Paulus Potter (1625–54). But I still prefer Bonheur.
This trailblazing French woman became the darling of the English art scene. She spent her days in abattoirs and fields studying her animals, and by her early 30s, she had become famous over the Channel. Her trip to England allowed Rosa to meet the President of the Royal Academy & other British notables including John Ruskin & animalier Edwin Landseer. Even Queen Victoria attended a private viewing of the equestrian scene during Rosa’s visit.
The Horse Fair (1852-55), in Metropolitan Museum of Art, is Bonheur’s best-known painting. Praised as one of the world’s greatest animal picture, it was reproduced and sold as a print across Britain. Her pastoral pictures eg The Highland Shepherd (1859) often depicted shepherds and farmers wearing old working clothes.
Bonheur, The Horse Fair (1852-5)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Bonheur became the first woman to win France’s Legion of Honour in 1865, presented by Napoleon III’s wife Empress Eugénie who understood that genius had no gender. Her successes meant that Bonheur could financially support herself and the women she loved eg her partner Nathalie Micas for 40+ years.
Remember Linda Nochlin’s 1971 essay Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? Nochlin acknowledged Bonheur’s great talent by pointing out the relevant circumstances, renewing attention on Bonheur, 70+ years after her death. Nochlin regarded Bonheur’s relationship with Micas as a companionable, platonic union. This arrangement for wonderful for women who, pre-contraception, wished to avoid the burden of childcare. Later writers described the artist’s relationship with Micas as gay, and also emphasised Bonheur’s ties to artist-lover Anna Elizabeth Klumpke.
The Franco-Prussian war (1870–1), siege, Commune and a shared sense of powerlessness encouraged Rosa to think about fierce animal predators. Lions and tigers obsessed her, even though she saw that these powerful, majestic creatures had the potential to destroy nature. In 1872, she painted Couching Lion, showing a majestic cat reclining against a steep backdrop, head raised.
By the mid-1870s, Bonheur’s creativity drew widespread interest. Powerful cats now became Rosa’s main purpose but she was still anxious about lions. Rosa knew she could calm a raging bull and pacify a startled pony. But Algerian lions were unfamiliar; she had no experience of how lions reacted. Caged lions could be readily observed, but that would been unacceptable. So with her friend Nathalie, Rosa agreed to visit Château de Saint-Leu. Courageous Nathalie’s marched up to the free-roaming lioness and ran her hand along the creature’s back. No problem; Rosa was awestruck. From then on, trips to Saint-Leu permitted Rosa to study the lioness’s unique physical and temperamental design.
National Museum of Women in the Arts, Wash DC
In her life, Bonheur’s realistic paintings of horses, oxen, lions and other animals won widespread fame. Even after her death in 1899, the French artist, her sketches & preparatory drawings sold for an unprecedented price. But her work fell out of favour in her homeland with the rise of Impressionism, Abstract Art and art photography. Of course Bonheur still dedicated her life to her career, living by her own rules, dressing in men’s clothes, smoking cigars, living with female partners and by insisting on independence. Sadly she has only enjoyed a resurgence of attention recently.
Lawyer Katherine Brault bought Bonheur’s chateau in 2017 and is converting it into the Musée de l'atelier Rosa Bonheur, with substantial French government financial support. In the meantime the famous Musée d’Orsay will host an exhibition of Bonheur’s seen and unseen works during Oct 2022-Jan 2023. See Bonheur’s hidden sides eg her passion for opera.