Tom

This past week saw the birthday of Rosa Bonheur (16 March 1822), primarily a painter of animals but also a sculptor and widely recognized as the most famous female painter of the 19th century. She was born in Bordeaux, Gironde and was the oldest in a family of artists. Her father was a landscape and portrait painter and her siblings include the painters Auguste Bonheur and Julliette Bonheur and the sculptor Isidore Jules Bonheur.

The Bonheur family adhered to Saint-Simeonism, a political, religious and social movement which, among other things, promoted the education of women alongside men. As a very young child she loved to sketch and her mother taught her to read and write by asking her to choose and draw a different animal for each letter of the alphabet. After a failed apprenticeship with a seamstress at age 12, her father began training her as a painter. He allowed live animals into the family’s studio for her to study. At 14 she began to copy paintings in The Louvre and she studied animal anatomy and bone structure in the abattoirs of Paris and dissected them at the National Veterinary Institute.

In 1849, she received a commission by the French Government and the result was the painting ‘Ploughing in the Nivernais’ which received a first class medal at the salon.

The focus of the painting is almost entirely on the dozen Charolais oxen, the farmer behind them is almost invisible. It is similar to some Dutch painters in its clarity and light. This painting, together with ‘The Horse Fair’, above, are her two most famous paintings. These works led to fame and recognition and she traveled to Scotland where she met Queen Victoria, who was an admirer of her work. While she was more popular in England than in France, she was decorated with the Legion of Honour by the Empress Eugénie.

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 that followed her. She was fairly openly a lesbian; 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.

Rosa Bonheur broke boundaries by deciding to wear pants, shirts and ties. 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, Bonheur identified with the power and freedom reserved for men. 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.

With the advent of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, Bonheur and her naturalism fell from fashion but has since recovered to some extent. She was certainly a remarkable woman and paved the way for many women who came after her. She died on 25 May, 1899 and was buried in Paris. Here is a photo of her taken in the 1890s followed by some of her works.