May 12, 2022 43The Bucolic Heroic
Regina MarlerArt Is a Tyrant:
The Unconventional
Life of Rosa Bonheur
by Catherine Hewitt.
Icon, 483 pp., $39.95;
$18.95 (paper)A coastal hotel in Bordeaux, a Mar-
rakesh bathhouse, the first pet ceme-
tery in the US, a floating bar in Paris
renowned for its weekly Soirées Gay:
as the most famous female artist of the
nineteenth century, Rosa Bonheur left
her name across France and beyond.^1
For many people now, it may be only
a name, since the decline of Bonheur’s
fame after her death in 1899 was as
precipitous as her rise through the
Paris art world had been. Born in 1822
into a poor family in Bordeaux, Bon-
heur by her mid- twenties had become a
celebrated animalière, or painter (and
sculptor) of animals: she painted oxen
in the field, lions, horses, sheep (wild
and domestic), and countless cows. Her
best- known picture, The Horse Fair
(1852–1855), hangs in the Metropolitan
Museum of Art. It was donated by Cor-
nelius Vanderbilt, who had purchased
it in 1887 for $53,000 (about $1.6 mil-
lion today).
Bonheur’s painstaking realism has
long since fallen out of fashion, but in-
terest in her life as well as her art is on
the rise. This fall the Musée d’Orsay
will host its first exhibition devoted to
her work; a French postage stamp hon-
oring her bicentennial was issued in
March; and recently, the first full- scale
biography in forty years appeared: Art
Is a Tyrant by Catherine Hewitt.
Bonheur described her life as one
of “struggle, triumph, and glory.” At
the height of her career she had a stu-
dio in Paris, a mansion in Nice, and a
château at the edge of the Fontaine-
bleau forest—now a museum—where
she kept an unruly menagerie that
included monkeys, wild horses from
America (a gift from an admirer), and
a free- roaming lion named Fathma. On
one trip to England and Scotland, she
acquired a bull, two cows, four sheep,
and three calves. “They are so pictur-
esque and their color so beautiful that
I should like to paint them all at the
same time,” she wrote to her sister, Ju-
liette. “I shouldn’t like to fail with a sin-
gle one.” Hewitt writes that she studied
animals’ eyes especially; in them she
“felt certain she could see an animal’s
soul.”
Animalier art developed out of the
Romantic movement and flourished
in France and England from the 1830s
through the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury. The Romantics had a complicated
relationship with nature, both thrilling
to its terrifying power and intensity and
seeking to reconnect with its peaceful,
uncorrupted beauties. The art histo-
rian Whitney Chadwick has argued
that “it was the search for expressions
of feeling unencumbered by social con-
straints that underlay both the embrace
of animal imagery... and the fame en-
joyed by Rosa Bonheur.”Leading animaliers during Bon-
heur’s youth included Pierre Jules
Mêne, Jacques Raymond Brascassat,
and Constant Troyon; she admired and
learned from them. (She was rarely ad-
versarial, even as she clambered up the
ranks.) The Académie des Beaux- Arts
showed some resistance at first to what
seemed a trivial genre, but after King
Louis- Philippe awarded several public
commissions to the sculptor Antoine-
Louis Barye, his success helped estab-
lish animal art within the complicated
hierarchies of the French academic can-
on—a middling position somewhere
between landscape and genre painting,
Théophile Gautier argued. Barye spe-
cialized in depictions of exotic beasts
attacking or consuming their prey, with
titles like Python Killing a Gnu and
Tiger Devouring a Gavial. The first
paintings Bonheur submitted to the
Paris Salon showed such a mastery of
anatomy and naturalistic detail that her
work was compared with his.
Though Bonheur, a generation
younger, became far more success-
ful, Barye’s sinuous, expressive forms
weathered the transition to modernism
better than hers. (A line of influence
can be drawn between Barye, his stu-
dent Rodin, and Brancusi, who briefly
apprenticed with Rodin.) She is per-
haps more closely allied with the En-
glish painter and sculptor Sir Edwin
Landseer, whom she revered. Hewitt
describes Bonheur’s 1855 visit to Land-
seer’s studio in London, as recollectedby her chaperone, Lady Eastlake, who
translated Landseer’s remarks for the
silent Bonheur:Landseer presented one picture or
sketch after another, and at the end
of the visit, offered her two of his
brother’s engravings of his Night
(c. 1853) and Morning (c. 1853), on
which he inscribed her name with
his.Afterward, in the carriage home, “the
Englishwoman noticed that ‘the lit-
tle head was turned from me, her face
streaming with tears.’”Marie- Rosalie Bonheur was the el-
dest of four siblings who all became
professional artists. Her father, Rai-
mond, was a minor genre painter and
drawing instructor, which became
Rosa’s entrée to a profession largely
closed to women. From a young age she
was artistically precocious but indiffer-
ent to schooling; she had no interest in
learning to read until her mother, So-
phie, taught her the alphabet by having
her draw animals for each letter.
Perennially short of cash, Raimond
moved the family to Paris when Rosa
was seven, beginning a difficult, itiner-
ant existence. Prone to enthusiasms, he
converted to Saint- Simonianism, a bur-
geoning Christian socialist movement
that advocated education for women,
among other progressive ideals. InParis, Rosa briefly attended her broth-
ers’ school, and later wrote that this ex-
periment in coeducation “emancipated
me before I knew what emancipation
meant and left me free to develop natu-
rally and untrammelled.”
After Sophie’s early death—from
strain and overwork, by most ac-
counts—Raimond enrolled Rosa in
a girls’ boarding school, where she
made herself “an element of discord,”
she recalled proudly. Only for art con-
tests—judged by her father—did she
apply herself. Thus, almost as a last
resort, she won the chance to pursue a
career as an artist. Raimond organized
a home académie for her, assigning her
copying tasks similar to those at the
all- male École des Beaux- Arts. Soon
she was painting from nature and going
to the Louvre to copy masterworks
and endure the jibes of male art stu-
dents. Later, when Raimond suggested
she sign her work with his name, she
refused.
As well as sketching in the Bois de
Boulogne and at the zoo in the Jardin
des Plantes, Bonheur also ventured
into Paris slaughterhouses, like her
male contemporaries; these studies
gave her the command of anatomy that
caught the eye of the Salon judges. She
also made trips into the countryside
to sketch animals in nature: “I loved
capturing the rapid movement of the
animals, the sheen of their coats, the
subtlety of their characters, for each
animal has its own physiognomy.” At
home she kept a growing menagerie of
models, including birds, rabbits, ducks,
butterflies, rats, a squirrel named Kiki,
a ewe, and a billy goat. Guests were
“greeted by the unmistakable odor of
livestock and the sounds of bleating,
chirruping and scuttling of all sorts.”
Upstairs, in a large, well- lit room, the
Bonheur siblings set up their easels be-
side their father’s—a cottage industry
in the making.
Bonheur made her debut at the
1841 Paris Salon at nineteen; the jury
selected two of her works: a sketch of
goats and sheep grazing and a paint-
ing of rabbits. Although women had
been exhibiting at the Salon since the
1780s—Raimond had urged Rosa to
adopt Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun as a
role model—their work was seldom
taken seriously. “Women painters pre-
fer sentimental little scenes, flowers
and portraits,” wrote Théophile Thoré,
a prominent critic of the day. But Bon-
heur pressed forward with her unusual
specialty: three paintings and a clay
sculpture in 1842, two paintings and
a plaster bull in 1843. Every work she
submitted to the Salon was accepted.
She began to attract sales and in 1844
received her first brief press mention:
the models for her painting Sheep in a
Meadow were said to be among “‘the
softest, cleanest, most abundant in
fleecy wool’ of their species,” Hewitt
writes.
Her reputation grew with each
Salon. She earned a third- class prize
in 1845 and finally, three years later,
a gold medal—awarded by a jury that
included Camille Corot, Ernest Meis-
sonier, and Eugène Delacroix. Govern-
ment commissions followed. The first
was Plowing in the Nivernais (1849): on
a canvas of nearly 52 by 100 inches, theRosa Bonheur; painting by Édouard-Louis Dubufe and Rosa Bonheur, 1849. In Art Is
a Tyrant, Catherine Hewitt writes that Dubufe painted Bonheur and she painted the bull.RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource(^1) In 1979, Rosa Bonheur Memorial
Park near Baltimore (since closed) also
became the first cemetery to allow peo-
ple to be buried alongside their pets.
Marler 43 45 .indd 43 4 / 13 / 22 4 : 40 PM