Modern Age
Rosa Bonheur (1822–1899)
French Realism painter.
Rosa Bonheur was the most celebrated animal painter of the nineteenth century and, in her lifetime, one of the most famous women artists in the world. Born in Bordeaux in 1822 into a family of artists shaped by the utopian Saint-Simonian movement, which held that women could achieve as men did, she was trained by her father and learned to draw by copying in the Louvre and studying live animals wherever she could find them.
Her art rests on relentless anatomical observation. She kept a small menagerie, dissected animals to understand their structure, and went in person to horse fairs, cattle markets, and slaughterhouses to study her subjects from life. To move freely in those masculine spaces she obtained an official police 'permission de travestissement' allowing her to wear men's clothing — a practical licence she renewed for years. The result was work of a truthfulness and scale that won her the vast 'Ploughing in the Nivernais' (1849) and the enormous 'Horse Fair' (1852–55), which triumphed across Europe and America.
Bonheur lived openly and independently, sharing her life first with Nathalie Micas and later with the American painter Anna Klumpke, who became her companion and biographer. In 1865 the Empress Eugénie made her a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur — by most accounts the first woman artist so honoured — and she was promoted to Officer in 1894. She died at her château at By, near Fontainebleau, in 1899; Klumpke's 1908 biography preserves her recollections in her own remembered words.
The words the record keeps using: observant, vigorous, dignified, independent, truthful, tender, monumental.
At a glance
- Lived 1822–1899
- Origin French
- Worked in Paris
- Era Modern Age
- Movements Realism
- Mediums Oil on canvas
- Techniques Chiaroscuro
Works in the archive
- Ploughing in the Nivernais (Labourage nivernais), 1849 (Musée d'Orsay, Paris)
Teams of powerful Charolais oxen drag ploughs across the reddish autumn soil of the Nivernais, turning the earth in the season's first deep tilling (sombrage). Commissioned by the French State and shown at the 1849… - The Horse Fair, 1852 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
Powerful Percheron draught horses are led and wrestled through the horse market held along a Paris boulevard, rearing and surging in a great frieze of muscle and motion. Over five metres wide, it was the sensation of… - Sheep by the Sea, 1865 (National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington)
A small, intimate canvas of sheep resting and grazing on a grassy coastal bluff above the sea, a study in the quiet weight and woolly texture of the flock. It shows the tender, close-observed register of Bonheur's… - Cattle in the Auvergne, 1867 (National Gallery of Art, Washington)
Cattle move through the upland pasture of the Auvergne, their heavy bodies and pale coats set against the region's rolling green highland. A characteristic study of the working and grazing beast in its native landscape,…
What was said
To study her subjects at horse fairs, cattle markets, and slaughterhouses — spaces effectively closed to a woman in skirts — Bonheur obtained an official police 'permission de travestissement', a document permitting her to wear men's clothing in public, which she renewed over a period of years and treated as a practical necessity for her work.
In 1865 the Empress Eugénie, acting as regent, personally conferred the cross of the Légion d'honneur on Bonheur — by most accounts the first woman artist to be so honoured, later promoted to Officer in 1894 — and is reported to have remarked that genius has no sex. The remark is traditionally attributed to the Empress and is not verbatim documented.
In the recollections she gave to Anna Klumpke, Bonheur held that animals deserved to be studied with the same anatomical seriousness and granted the same dignity that history painting reserved for the human figure, and that her truth to them came from unrelenting observation from life, from dissection, and from the markets and fields themselves.
What would Rosa make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Rosa Bonheur", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Rosa · Keep a life moment the way Rosa would · Pictures made after Rosa