 |
The Horse Fair, 1852-55,
Rosa Bonheur, Metropolitan Museum of Art
|
Henry
James, who invented the fictional New Woman of the 19th
century, made his heroines pay a price for their independence. Was that accurate?
Recently I wrote about les
trois grandes dames of Impressionism and the early feminists who came to be
known as New Women. Their rise coincided with James’ novels, so it’s hard to say
which came first, the fiction or the truth. Either way, the accepted story is
that they made great sacrifices in order to be true to themselves.
Americans know Rosa Bonheur mainly for
the sprawling The Horse Fair in the Metropolitan
Museum of Art. Bonheur was a genre painter, an animalière, as they were called in the 19th
century.
 |
Weaning the Calves, 1879,
Rosa Bonheur, Metropolitan Museum of Art
|
Bonheur was a fractious child and an indifferent student,
but she was an apt draftsman from a very young age. That’s not surprising,
since she was from a family of excellent artists. Her father was painter Oscar-Raymond Bonheur. Among her siblings
were painters Auguste Bonheur and Juliette
Bonheur and sculptor Isidore
Jules Bonheur. Improbably, they all focused on animals as their
subject. All of them were highly competent artists. None of them were as
successful as their sister.
Bonheur was the eldest. It was not until she failed an
apprenticeship as a seamstress at the tender age of 12 that she returned to her
father’s studio for serious training. He set her to traditional study, copying
works from books and sketching plaster casts. From there she moved to
dissection and anatomy studies of animals in the abattoirs of Paris.
 |
Bonheur’s permission de travestissement from the Paris
police.
|
To make The Horse Fair,
Bonheur visited the Paris horse market twice weekly for 18 months. She sought
and gained a permission de
travestissement (permission to cross-dress) from the Paris police
to avoid drawing attention to herself. Earlier forays to the
slaughterhouse, she said, had resulted in harassment.
That may have been a polite fiction, as Bonheur routinely dressed
like a (male) peasant at home. This was not solely a political statement;
she felt that trousers were more practical when working with farm animals. She wore
her hair at collar length—slightly longer than the male styles of the time, but
too short to be worn up as most women did. And while she wore trousers at home,
she dressed in feminine style for formal portraits.
 |
Rosa Bonheur in her garden at By, c. 1890s, provenance unknown
|
Bonheur was openly lesbian; she lived with her childhood
chum Nathalie Micas for over 40 years, until Micas' death in 1889. Later, she
lived with American genre painter Anna Elizabeth
Klumpke. “I am a painter. I have earned my living honestly. My private life
is nobody's concern,” she wrote.
What effect did this have on her career? Apparently, none. She
exhibited regularly at the Paris Salon from 1841 to 1855, winning
exemption from jury approval in 1853. Her greatest sales, however, were in the
United Kingdom, where she was introduced by her dealer in 1855. She made many
trips to England and Scotland to sketch. On one of these trips, she was introduced
to Queen Victoria, who was a fan.
 |
Changing of Meadow, 1863,
Rosa Bonheur, Kunsthalle Hamburg
|
As she grew older, Bonheur's work gained popularity among the new
American millionaires, including Cornelius Vanderbilt. When he bought The Horse Fair in 1887 on the secondary
market, it was for a record sum.
By 1860, Bonheur was wealthy enough to acquire a chateau at
By, near Fontainebleau.
She remodeled it extensively, including adding pens for her animal models. She
was the first woman to be awarded the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour,
in 1865. And she was famous enough to paint “Buffalo Bill” Cody when
his Wild West show visited
Paris in 1889.
Bonheur made a success of her life, on her own terms. It’s the work, not the artist, which ultimately sells.
