Rosa Bonheur 1822-1899

By Katie Bono

Rosa Bonheur, The Horse Fair, 1853-55, oil on canvas, 244.5 x 506.7 cm), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Rosa Bonheur was a renowned French painter and sculptor who was born in Bordeaux on March 16th, 1822. Bonheur was trained by her father, Raymond Bonheur, who was a painter as well. She showed a lot of talent from a young age and exhibited at her first Salon at age 19. Her primary source of inspiration for her work was her love for animals. Most of Bonheur’s work was painting but occasionally she sculpted animal studies. Her rather sympathetic portrayal of animals in pastoral settings came at a time when there was an increasing trend in learning about natural history. Her Realist painting style was facilitated by her direct observations of nature; she observed horses and livestock via her small menagerie, visiting slaughterhouses, and conducting dissections. French Realism was the conventional style during Bonheur’s career, emerging around the 1840s, and Courbet and Millet were both popular contemporaries of hers.  

In 1848, Bonheur received a lucrative commission from the State and painted Ploughing in the Nivernais which exhibited at the subsequent Salon to a favourable critical reception. Her work The Horse Fair (1853) is widely thought to be her masterpiece. It has a typical Realist subversion of French hierarchies in painting as it depicts a rural scene on a scale typically reserved for History painting. Her Realist tendency towards anatomical precision is seen in the muscles and movement of the horses, but the colour and lighting of the piece is characterized as Romantic, which was outside of Bonheur’s typical style. In fact, her style remained remarkably stable throughout her career. After a positive Salon reception, The Horse Fair went on tour around Great Britain (where Bonheur presented it to Queen Victoria) and the United States. The work was purchased by Cornelius Vanderbilt in 1887 and donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where it remains today. 

In 1855, Bonheur decided to stop exhibiting at Salons and withdrew from the Paris art scene after 1860, moving to Chateau de By near Fontainebleau with her partner Nathalie Micas. Bonheur continued to paint consistently but in a very independent setting. In 1865, Bonheur became the first woman to receive the Legion d’honneur from the Empress Eugenie. Despite all this indisputable talent and success, Bonheur was widely criticized among the French contemporary audience. There were many factors, one of which was Bonheur’s eccentricity. She was unconventional by the standards of her day - she had short hair, obtained special permission to wear trousers to work at the horse market, and had a relationship with another woman. In fact, she famously said: ‘As far as males go, I only like the bulls I paint.’ The other aspect to her criticism was the feeling that Bonheur was not French enough - many of her buyers were English and American and her style itself was critiqued for being too English. Beyond being considered to have ‘deserted’ France, she was subject to anti-Semitic sentiment. In recent years, Bordeaux has come to re-appreciate Bonheur with retrospectives of her work. In 1889, Bonheur was devastated by the death of her companion Micas. She spent her final years in a relationship with a younger American woman painter, Anna Klumpke until she died in May 1889. 

 Bibliography

Blume, Mary. “The Rise and Fall of Rosa Bonheur.” International Herald Tribune. 1997; https://www.nytimes.com/1997/10/04/style/IHT-the-rise-and-fall-of-rosa-bonheur.html.  

McPherson, Heather. "Bonheur, (Marie-)Rosa." Grove Art Online. 2003; https://www.oxfordartonline.com/groveart/view/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.001.0001/oao-9781884446054-e-7000009871.  

“Rosa Bonheur.” The National Gallery. https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/rosa-bonheur.