Rosa Bonheur
Encyclopedia
Rosa Bonheur, born Marie-Rosalie Bonheur, (16 March 1822 – 25 May 1899) was a French animalière, realist
artist
, and sculptor. As a painter
she became famous primarily for two chief works: Ploughing in the Nivernais (in french: Le labourage nivernais, le sombrage), which was first exhibited at the Salon of 1848, and is now in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris
depicts a team of oxen plough
ing a field while attended by peasants set against a vast pastoral
landscape; 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 is widely considered to have been the most famous female painter of the nineteenth century.
, Gironde
, the oldest child in a family of artists. Her father Raimond Bonheur was a landscape
and portrait painter
and an early adherent of Saint-Simonianism
, a Christian
-socialist
sect that promoted the education of women alongside men. The Saint-Simonians also prophesied
the coming of a female messiah
. Her mother Sophie (née Marquis) who died when Rosa Bonheur was only eleven, had been a piano
teacher. Bonheur's younger siblings included the animal painters Auguste Bonheur and Juliette Bonheur and the animal sculptor Isidore Jules Bonheur. That the Bonheur family was renowned as a family of artists is attested to by the fact that Francis Galton
, the cousin of Charles Darwin
used the Bonheurs as an example of "Hereditary
Genius
" in his 1869 essay of the same title.
Bonheur was born in Bordeaux
(where her father had been friends with Francisco Goya
who was living there in exile
) but moved to Paris
in 1828 at the age of six with her mother and brothers, her father having gone ahead of them to establish a residence and income
. By family accounts, she had been an unruly child and had a difficult time learning to read. To remedy this her mother taught her to read and write by having her select and draw an animal
for each letter
of the alphabet
. To this practice in the company of her doting mother she attributed her love of drawing
animals.
Although she was sent to school
like her brothers, she was a disruptive force in the classroom
and was consequently expelled from numerous schools. Finally, after trying to apprentice
her to a seamstress
Raimond agreed to take her education as a painter upon himself. She was twelve at that point and would have been too young to attend the École des Beaux-Arts
even if they had accepted women.
As was traditional in the art schools
of the period, Bonheur began her artistic training by copying images from drawing books and by sketching from plaster models. As her training progressed she began to make studies of domesticated animals from life, to include horse
s, sheep, cows, goat
s, rabbit
s and other animals in the pastures on the perimeter of Paris, the open fields of Villiers
and the (then) still-wild Bois de Boulogne
. At age fourteen she began to copy from paintings at the Louvre
. Among her favorite painters were Nicholas Poussin and Peter Paul Rubens, but she also copied the paintings of Paulus Potter
, Porbus, Louis Léopold Robert, Salvatore Rosa and Karel Dujardin
.
She also studied animal anatomy
and osteology
by visiting the abattoirs
of Paris and by performing dissection
s of animals at the École nationale vétérinaire d'Alfort
, the National Veterinary
Institute in Paris. There she prepared detailed studies which she would later use as references for her paintings and sculptures. During this period, too, she also met and became friends with the father and son comparative anatomists
and zoologists Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire
and Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire
by whom her father was employed to create natural history
illustrations.
Rosa Bonheur received a French government commission which led to her first great success, Ploughing in the Nivernais, exhibited in 1849. Her most famous work was the monumental Horse Fair, completed in 1855, which measured eight feet high by sixteen feet wide. Its subject is the horse market held in Paris on the tree-lined boulevard de l’Hôpital, near the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital
, visible in the background on the left. It led to international fame and recognition and that same year she travelled to Scotland, "en route" meeting Queen Victoria, who admired her work, and where she completed sketches for later works including A Scottish Raid, completed in 1860, and Highland Shepherd. These were anachronistic
pieces as they depicted a way of life in the Scottish highlands
that had disappeared a century earlier. Nonetheless, they had enormous appeal to Victorian
sensibilities. She was especially popular in England, though less so in her native France.
(1814–1902), which would purchase the reproduction rights to her work and sell engraved copies of her paintings. It was Gambart who brought Bonheur to the United Kingdom in 1855. Many engravings were created by the skillful Charles George Lewis (1808–1880), one of the finest engravers of his day. Gambart sold through his gallery in London's Pall Mall
.
criticism to locate Bonheur as a proto-Feminist
and as a pivotal figure for Queer theory
, she is perhaps most famous today because she was known for wearing men's clothing and living with women. Her work and artistic talent has now become somewhat secondary in importance to her manner of dress, her choice of companions and her penchant for smoking
cigarettes. On her wearing of trousers, she said at the time that her choice of attire was simply practical as it facilitated her work with animals: "I was forced to recognize that the clothing of my sex was a constant bother. That is why I decided to solicit the authorization to wear men's clothing from the prefect of police. But the suit I wear is my work attire, and nothing else. The epithets of imbeciles have never bothered me...." She lived for over forty years with her childhood friend Nathalie Micas. In the final year of her life she became close with Anna Klumpke, the author of her "autobiography".
She died at the age of 77, at Thomery
(By), France. Many of her paintings, which had not previously been shown publicly, were sold at auction in Paris in 1900.
, an American
painter from Boston
who made Bonheur’s acquaintance in 1887 while serving as a translator for an American collector of her work and who later became the older artist’s companion in the last year of her life. This account, 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. The third, and most authoritative work is Reminiscences of Rosa Bonheur, edited by Theodore Stanton (the son of Elizabeth Cady Stanton
, the American feminist
), and published simultaneously in London
and New York
in 1910. This volume includes numerous correspondences between Bonheur and her family and friends, subsequently lending the deepest insight into the artist’s life, as well as her understanding of her own art-making practices and the art world in general. The volume is arranged in a loosely chronological
fashion, except when letters and reviews are grouped by correspondent or critic.
Realism (arts)
Realism in the visual arts and literature refers to the general attempt to depict subjects "in accordance with secular, empirical rules", as they are considered to exist in third person objective reality, without embellishment or interpretation...
artist
Artist
An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...
, and sculptor. As a painter
Painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...
she became famous primarily for two chief works: Ploughing in the Nivernais (in french: Le labourage nivernais, le sombrage), which was first exhibited at the Salon of 1848, and is now in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
depicts a team of oxen plough
Plough
The plough or plow is a tool used in farming for initial cultivation of soil in preparation for sowing seed or planting. It has been a basic instrument for most of recorded history, and represents one of the major advances in agriculture...
ing a field while attended by peasants set against a vast pastoral
Pastoral
The adjective pastoral refers to the lifestyle of pastoralists, such as shepherds herding livestock around open areas of land according to seasons and the changing availability of water and pasturage. It also refers to a genre in literature, art or music that depicts such shepherd life in an...
landscape; 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
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a renowned art museum in New York City. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, located on the eastern edge of Central Park along Manhattan's Museum Mile, is one of the...
, in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
. Bonheur is widely considered to have been the most famous female painter of the nineteenth century.
Early development and artistic training
Bonheur was born in BordeauxBordeaux
Bordeaux is a port city on the Garonne River in the Gironde department in southwestern France.The Bordeaux-Arcachon-Libourne metropolitan area, has a population of 1,010,000 and constitutes the sixth-largest urban area in France. It is the capital of the Aquitaine region, as well as the prefecture...
, Gironde
Gironde
For the Revolutionary party, see Girondists.Gironde is a common name for the Gironde estuary, where the mouths of the Garonne and Dordogne rivers merge, and for a department in the Aquitaine region situated in southwest France.-History:...
, the oldest child in a family of artists. Her father Raimond Bonheur was a landscape
Landscape art
Landscape art is a term that covers the depiction of natural scenery such as mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests, and especially art where the main subject is a wide view, with its elements arranged into a coherent composition. In other works landscape backgrounds for figures can still...
and portrait painter
Portrait painting
Portrait painting is a genre in painting, where the intent is to depict the visual appearance of the subject. Beside human beings, animals, pets and even inanimate objects can be chosen as the subject for a portrait...
and an early adherent of Saint-Simonianism
Saint-Simonianism
Saint-Simonianism was a French political and social movement of the first half of the 19th century, inspired by the ideas of Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon ....
, a Christian
Christian
A Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the Canonical gospels and the letters of the New Testament...
-socialist
Socialism
Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy; or a political philosophy advocating such a system. "Social ownership" may refer to any one of, or a combination of, the following: cooperative enterprises,...
sect that promoted the education of women alongside men. The Saint-Simonians also prophesied
Prophecy
Prophecy is a process in which one or more messages that have been communicated to a prophet are then communicated to others. Such messages typically involve divine inspiration, interpretation, or revelation of conditioned events to come as well as testimonies or repeated revelations that the...
the coming of a female messiah
Messiah
A messiah is a redeemer figure expected or foretold in one form or another by a religion. Slightly more widely, a messiah is any redeemer figure. Messianic beliefs or theories generally relate to eschatological improvement of the state of humanity or the world, in other words the World to...
. Her mother Sophie (née Marquis) who died when Rosa Bonheur was only eleven, had been a piano
Piano
The piano is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard. It is one of the most popular instruments in the world. Widely used in classical and jazz music for solo performances, ensemble use, chamber music and accompaniment, the piano is also very popular as an aid to composing and rehearsal...
teacher. Bonheur's younger siblings included the animal painters Auguste Bonheur and Juliette Bonheur and the animal sculptor Isidore Jules Bonheur. That the Bonheur family was renowned as a family of artists is attested to by the fact that Francis Galton
Francis Galton
Sir Francis Galton /ˈfrɑːnsɪs ˈgɔːltn̩/ FRS , cousin of Douglas Strutt Galton, half-cousin of Charles Darwin, was an English Victorian polymath: anthropologist, eugenicist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, psychometrician, and statistician...
, the cousin of Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...
used the Bonheurs as an example of "Hereditary
Heredity
Heredity is the passing of traits to offspring . This is the process by which an offspring cell or organism acquires or becomes predisposed to the characteristics of its parent cell or organism. Through heredity, variations exhibited by individuals can accumulate and cause some species to evolve...
Genius
Genius
Genius is something or someone embodying exceptional intellectual ability, creativity, or originality, typically to a degree that is associated with the achievement of unprecedented insight....
" in his 1869 essay of the same title.
Bonheur was born in Bordeaux
Bordeaux
Bordeaux is a port city on the Garonne River in the Gironde department in southwestern France.The Bordeaux-Arcachon-Libourne metropolitan area, has a population of 1,010,000 and constitutes the sixth-largest urban area in France. It is the capital of the Aquitaine region, as well as the prefecture...
(where her father had been friends with Francisco Goya
Francisco Goya
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was a Spanish romantic painter and printmaker regarded both as the last of the Old Masters and the first of the moderns. Goya was a court painter to the Spanish Crown, and through his works was both a commentator on and chronicler of his era...
who was living there in exile
Exile
Exile means to be away from one's home , while either being explicitly refused permission to return and/or being threatened with imprisonment or death upon return...
) but moved to Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
in 1828 at the age of six with her mother and brothers, her father having gone ahead of them to establish a residence and income
Income
Income is the consumption and savings opportunity gained by an entity within a specified time frame, which is generally expressed in monetary terms. However, for households and individuals, "income is the sum of all the wages, salaries, profits, interests payments, rents and other forms of earnings...
. By family accounts, she had been an unruly child and had a difficult time learning to read. To remedy this her mother taught her to read and write by having her select and draw an animal
Animal
Animals are a major group of multicellular, eukaryotic organisms of the kingdom Animalia or Metazoa. Their body plan eventually becomes fixed as they develop, although some undergo a process of metamorphosis later on in their life. Most animals are motile, meaning they can move spontaneously and...
for each letter
Letter (alphabet)
A letter is a grapheme in an alphabetic system of writing, such as the Greek alphabet and its descendants. Letters compose phonemes and each phoneme represents a phone in the spoken form of the language....
of the alphabet
Alphabet
An alphabet is a standard set of letters—basic written symbols or graphemes—each of which represents a phoneme in a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past. There are other systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic...
. To this practice in the company of her doting mother she attributed her love of drawing
Drawing
Drawing is a form of visual art that makes use of any number of drawing instruments to mark a two-dimensional medium. Common instruments include graphite pencils, pen and ink, inked brushes, wax color pencils, crayons, charcoal, chalk, pastels, markers, styluses, and various metals .An artist who...
animals.
Education in France
The French educational system is highly centralized, organized, and ramified. It is divided into three different stages:* the primary education ;* secondary education ;...
like her brothers, she was a disruptive force in the classroom
Classroom
A classroom is a room in which teaching or learning activities can take place. Classrooms are found in educational institutions of all kinds, including public and private schools, corporations, and religious and humanitarian organizations...
and was consequently expelled from numerous schools. Finally, after trying to apprentice
Apprenticeship
Apprenticeship is a system of training a new generation of practitioners of a skill. Apprentices or protégés build their careers from apprenticeships...
her to a seamstress
Sewing
Sewing is the craft of fastening or attaching objects using stitches made with a needle and thread. Sewing is one of the oldest of the textile arts, arising in the Paleolithic era...
Raimond agreed to take her education as a painter upon himself. She was twelve at that point and would have been too young to attend the École des Beaux-Arts
École des Beaux-Arts
École des Beaux-Arts refers to a number of influential art schools in France. The most famous is the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, now located on the left bank in Paris, across the Seine from the Louvre, in the 6th arrondissement. The school has a history spanning more than 350 years,...
even if they had accepted women.
As was traditional in the art schools
École des Beaux-Arts
École des Beaux-Arts refers to a number of influential art schools in France. The most famous is the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, now located on the left bank in Paris, across the Seine from the Louvre, in the 6th arrondissement. The school has a history spanning more than 350 years,...
of the period, Bonheur began her artistic training by copying images from drawing books and by sketching from plaster models. As her training progressed she began to make studies of domesticated animals from life, to include horse
Horse
The horse is one of two extant subspecies of Equus ferus, or the wild horse. It is a single-hooved mammal belonging to the taxonomic family Equidae. The horse has evolved over the past 45 to 55 million years from a small multi-toed creature into the large, single-toed animal of today...
s, sheep, cows, goat
Goat
The domestic goat is a subspecies of goat domesticated from the wild goat of southwest Asia and Eastern Europe. The goat is a member of the Bovidae family and is closely related to the sheep as both are in the goat-antelope subfamily Caprinae. There are over three hundred distinct breeds of...
s, rabbit
Rabbit
Rabbits are small mammals in the family Leporidae of the order Lagomorpha, found in several parts of the world...
s and other animals in the pastures on the perimeter of Paris, the open fields of Villiers
Villiers
-Places:In Canada* Villiers, Ontario, a small settlement near PeterboroughIn France* Villiers, Indre, in the Indre département* Villiers, Vienne, in the Vienne département* Villiers-Adam, in the Val-d'Oise département...
and the (then) still-wild Bois de Boulogne
Bois de Boulogne
The Bois de Boulogne is a park located along the western edge of the 16th arrondissement of Paris, near the suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt and Neuilly-sur-Seine...
. At age fourteen she began to copy from paintings at the Louvre
Louvre
The Musée du Louvre – in English, the Louvre Museum or simply the Louvre – is one of the world's largest museums, the most visited art museum in the world and a historic monument. A central landmark of Paris, it is located on the Right Bank of the Seine in the 1st arrondissement...
. Among her favorite painters were Nicholas Poussin and Peter Paul Rubens, but she also copied the paintings of Paulus Potter
Paulus Potter
Paulus Potter was a Dutch painter, specialized in animals in landscapes, usually with a low point of view. Before Potter died of tuberculosis, 28-years old, he succeeded in producing about a hundred paintings, working continuously.-Life:Few details are known of Potter's life...
, Porbus, Louis Léopold Robert, Salvatore Rosa and Karel Dujardin
Karel Dujardin
Karel Dujardin was a Dutch painter.-Biography:Karel Dujardin was a Dutch painter and etcher, born in Amsterdam in 1622. Although active as a portrait and history painter, he is best known for his Italianate landscapes. Typical of his landscape paintings is Farm Animals in the Shade of a Tree...
.
She also studied animal anatomy
Anatomy
Anatomy is a branch of biology and medicine that is the consideration of the structure of living things. It is a general term that includes human anatomy, animal anatomy , and plant anatomy...
and osteology
Osteology
Osteology is the scientific study of bones. A subdiscipline of anatomy, anthropology, and archeology, osteology is a detailed study of the structure of bones, skeletal elements, teeth, morphology, function, disease, pathology, the process of ossification , the resistance and hardness of bones , etc...
by visiting the abattoirs
Slaughterhouse
A slaughterhouse or abattoir is a facility where animals are killed for consumption as food products.Approximately 45-50% of the animal can be turned into edible products...
of Paris and by performing dissection
Dissection
Dissection is usually the process of disassembling and observing something to determine its internal structure and as an aid to discerning the functions and relationships of its components....
s of animals at the École nationale vétérinaire d'Alfort
École nationale vétérinaire d'Alfort
The École nationale vétérinaire d'Alfort is a school of veterinary medicine located at 7, avenue du Général de Gaulle, Maisons-Alfort, Val-de-Marne, Île-de-France, France...
, the National Veterinary
Veterinary medicine
Veterinary Medicine is the branch of science that deals with the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of disease, disorder and injury in non-human animals...
Institute in Paris. There she prepared detailed studies which she would later use as references for her paintings and sculptures. During this period, too, she also met and became friends with the father and son comparative anatomists
Comparative anatomy
Comparative anatomy is the study of similarities and differences in the anatomy of organisms. It is closely related to evolutionary biology and phylogeny .-Description:...
and zoologists Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire
Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire
Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire was a French naturalist who established the principle of "unity of composition". He was a colleague of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and expanded and defended Lamarck's evolutionary theories...
and Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire
Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire
Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire was a French zoologist and an authority on deviation from normal structure. He coined the term ethology.He was born in Paris, the son of Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire...
by whom her father was employed to create natural history
Natural history
Natural history is the scientific research of plants or animals, leaning more towards observational rather than experimental methods of study, and encompasses more research published in magazines than in academic journals. Grouped among the natural sciences, natural history is the systematic study...
illustrations.
Early success
Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital
The Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital is a teaching hospital located in Paris, France. Part of the Assistance publique - Hôpitaux de Paris, it is one of Europe's largest hospitals...
, visible in the background on the left. It led to international fame and recognition and that same year she travelled to Scotland, "en route" meeting Queen Victoria, who admired her work, and where she completed sketches for later works including A Scottish Raid, completed in 1860, and Highland Shepherd. These were anachronistic
Anachronism
An anachronism—from the Greek ανά and χρόνος — is an inconsistency in some chronological arrangement, especially a chronological misplacing of persons, events, objects, or customs in regard to each other...
pieces as they depicted a way of life in the Scottish highlands
Scottish Highlands
The Highlands is an historic region of Scotland. The area is sometimes referred to as the "Scottish Highlands". It was culturally distinguishable from the Lowlands from the later Middle Ages into the modern period, when Lowland Scots replaced Scottish Gaelic throughout most of the Lowlands...
that had disappeared a century earlier. Nonetheless, they had enormous appeal to Victorian
Victorian era
The Victorian era of British history was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities and national self-confidence...
sensibilities. She was especially popular in England, though less so in her native France.
Patronage and the market for her work
She was represented by private art galleries, and in particular that of Ernest GambartErnest Gambart
Jean Joseph Ernest Theodore Gambart was a Belgian-born English art publisher and dealer who dominated the London art world in the middle of the nineteenth century.-Life and career:...
(1814–1902), which would purchase the reproduction rights to her work and sell engraved copies of her paintings. It was Gambart who brought Bonheur to the United Kingdom in 1855. Many engravings were created by the skillful Charles George Lewis (1808–1880), one of the finest engravers of his day. Gambart sold through his gallery in London's Pall Mall
Pall Mall, London
Pall Mall is a street in the City of Westminster, London, and parallel to The Mall, from St. James's Street across Waterloo Place to the Haymarket; while Pall Mall East continues into Trafalgar Square. The street is a major thoroughfare in the St James's area of London, and a section of the...
.
Legacy
Due to a tendency in 1980s-1990s academicAcademia
Academia is the community of students and scholars engaged in higher education and research.-Etymology:The word comes from the akademeia in ancient Greece. Outside the city walls of Athens, the gymnasium was made famous by Plato as a center of learning...
criticism to locate Bonheur as a proto-Feminist
Feminism
Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...
and as a pivotal figure for Queer theory
Queer theory
Queer theory is a field of critical theory that emerged in the early 1990s out of the fields of LGBT studies and feminist studies. Queer theory includes both queer readings of texts and the theorisation of 'queerness' itself...
, she is perhaps most famous today because she was known for wearing men's clothing and living with women. Her work and artistic talent has now become somewhat secondary in importance to her manner of dress, her choice of companions and her penchant for smoking
Smoking
Smoking is a practice in which a substance, most commonly tobacco or cannabis, is burned and the smoke is tasted or inhaled. This is primarily practised as a route of administration for recreational drug use, as combustion releases the active substances in drugs such as nicotine and makes them...
cigarettes. On her wearing of trousers, she said at the time that her choice of attire was simply practical as it facilitated her work with animals: "I was forced to recognize that the clothing of my sex was a constant bother. That is why I decided to solicit the authorization to wear men's clothing from the prefect of police. But the suit I wear is my work attire, and nothing else. The epithets of imbeciles have never bothered me...." She lived for over forty years with her childhood friend Nathalie Micas. In the final year of her life she became close with Anna Klumpke, the author of her "autobiography".
She died at the age of 77, at Thomery
Thomery
Thomery is a commune in the Seine-et-Marne department in the Île-de-France region in north-central France, between the forest of Fontainebleau and the river Seine.Inhabitants of Thomery are called Thomeryons.-Economy:...
(By), France. Many of her paintings, which had not previously been shown publicly, were sold at auction in Paris in 1900.
Biographical works
While there are many sources of biographical information about Rosa Bonheur, there are three primary texts which are most consulted and cited in the subsequent literature; the first is a pamphlet written by Eugène de Mirecourt, Les Contemporains: Rosa Bonheur which appeared in 1856 just after her Salon success with The Horse Fair. When, in 1897, Venancio Deslandes came across a copy of this pamphlet he sent it to Bonheur with a request that she might tell him if it were accurate. This document, corrected and annotated by Rosa Bonheur herself is a key primary biographical source. The second account was written by Anna KlumpkeAnna Elizabeth Klumpke
Anna Elizabeth Klumpke , was American portrait and genre painter born in San Francisco, California, United States....
, an American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
painter from Boston
Boston
Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...
who made Bonheur’s acquaintance in 1887 while serving as a translator for an American collector of her work and who later became the older artist’s companion in the last year of her life. This account, 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
First-person narrative
First-person point of view is a narrative mode where a story is narrated by one character at a time, speaking for and about themselves. First-person narrative may be singular, plural or multiple as well as being an authoritative, reliable or deceptive "voice" and represents point of view in the...
voice. The third, and most authoritative work is Reminiscences of Rosa Bonheur, edited by Theodore Stanton (the son of Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Elizabeth Cady Stanton was an American social activist, abolitionist, and leading figure of the early woman's movement...
, the American feminist
Feminism
Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...
), and published simultaneously in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
and New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
in 1910. This volume includes numerous correspondences between Bonheur and her family and friends, subsequently lending the deepest insight into the artist’s life, as well as her understanding of her own art-making practices and the art world in general. The volume is arranged in a loosely chronological
Chronology
Chronology is the science of arranging events in their order of occurrence in time, such as the use of a timeline or sequence of events. It is also "the determination of the actual temporal sequence of past events".Chronology is part of periodization...
fashion, except when letters and reviews are grouped by correspondent or critic.
See also
- Women artistsWomen artistsWomen artists have been involved in making art in most times and places. Often certain certain media are associated with women, particularly textile arts; however, these gender roles in art change in different cultures and communities...
- Rosa Bonheur Memorial ParkRosa Bonheur Memorial ParkRosa Bonheur Memorial Park is a pet cemetery located in Elkridge, Maryland, USA. The cemetery was established in 1935, and was actively operated until 2002...
External links
- Rosa Bonheur - ArtcyclopediaArtCyclopediaArtcyclopedia is an online database of museum-quality fine art founded by Canadian John Malyon. The Artcyclopedia only deals with art that can be viewed online, and indexes 2,300 art sites , with links to around 180,000 artworks by 8,500 renowned artists. The site has also started to compile a list...
search - Rosa Bonheur - Rehs Galleries' biographical information and an image of her painting Couching Lion, 1872