44 The New York Reviewmuscularity of Bonheur’s oxen, strain-
ing against the harness in a freshly
plowed field glowing with sunlight—a
genre one might dub the Bucolic He-
roic—compares well with the tepid cat-
tle paintings of Gustave Courbet from
the same period. The painting, now at
the Musée d’Orsay, was a crowd favor-
ite at the Salon. “It is horribly like the
real thing,” Cézanne later remarked.
The peak of Bonheur’s career,
though, was without a doubt her monu-
mental painting The Horse Fair. At 96
by 199 inches, it covers most of a wall in
the Met’s European wing. Bonheur had
begun preliminary sketches for two
paintings, The Horse Fair and Hay-
making in the Auvergne, when a French
government minister, offered the choice,
commissioned the latter scene. It would
prove a poor bargain for the nation, since
Haymaking, now at the Château
de Fontainebleau, feels static and
forced, with generic peasants and
a heavy central wedge of shadow
cast by the hay cart. In contrast,
The Horse Fair is a masterpiece
of animal energy, its galloping,
barely controlled horses spinning
against the trees on a wide, dusty
Parisian boulevard, and even the
sky alive with motion.
The idea for the painting had
come to Bonheur while sketch-
ing in the Pyrenees; she wanted
to work on a large scale and re-
membered the fragment of the
Parthenon frieze she had studied
in the Louvre. For months, dis-
creetly clad in trousers, she frequented
the twice- weekly horse market on the
Boulevard de l’Hôpital, sketching the
Percheron workhorses and the men who
handled them. She prioritized her “great
picture” over Haymaking, and had to
work relentlessly to complete it before
the 1853 Salon. If it failed, the govern-
ment might withdraw its commission.
Hewitt recounts the sensation The
Horse Fair created. Bonheur deserved
a first- class medal, Delacroix remarked
in his journal, but no artist could
be awarded the same prize twice. A
London- based art dealer, Ernest Gam-
bart, bought the painting and arranged
for it to tour Britain, including a private
viewing for Queen Victoria. Thousands
of reproductions followed. On her 1856
trip to England and Scotland with
Gambart, she was surrounded by ad-
mirers, and even John Ruskin came to
meet her, though he thought her prefer-
ence for animals an artistic weakness.
During an after- dinner argument, he
exclaimed, “I don’t yield; to vanquish
me, you would have to crush me.” “I
wouldn’t like to go so far as that,” Bon-
heur replied.
The first biography of Bonheur ap-
peared in 1856, and in 1865 she was
made a chevalier of the Légion d’hon-
neur. When Empress Eugénie, the wife
of Napoleon III, pinned the medal on
Bonheur’s chest, she said, “Genius has
no sex.”In his essay “Why Look at Animals?”
(1977), John Berger noted the funda-
mental nostalgia of animalier art:The treatment of animals in
nineteenth- century romantic paint-
ing was already an acknowledge-
ment of their impending disappear-
ance. The images are of animals
receding into a wildness that ex-
isted only in the imagination.Publicity materials for the upcoming
Musée d’Orsay exhibition suggest that
the curators aim to investigate how
Bonheur’s portrayal of animals “calls
into question the hierarchy between
species.” That may be going too far,
but her art both influenced and devel-
oped alongside the emerging animal
welfare movement. The first animal
protection laws in France appeared in
the 1850s, and Bonheur corresponded
with friends in England’s antivivisec-
tion movement.
On the other hand, as Hewitt points
out, Bonheur was no vegetarian; her
letters are full of delighted descrip-
tions of country pâté and haunches of
venison. She loved hunting, and a pic-
ture survives of her sketching a freshly
killed deer strung up in a lifelike stand-
ing pose—a literal nature morte thatnow feels grotesque and at odds with
her genuine sympathy for animals. (A
friend of Bonheur’s recalled a little
mare at Fontainebleau that would rear
up to rest its hooves on her shoulders
and take a sugar cube from her mouth,
then follow her inside.)
As soon as she could afford it, Bon-
heur left Paris to live at Fontainebleau,
where she could quietly cohabit with
her partner, Nathalie Micas, who was
also her studio assistant and business
manager. (When Gambart made an
offer on The Horse Fair, Hewitt tells
us, it was Micas who drove a hard
bargain.) At Fontainebleau Bonheur
painted as much as eighteen hours a
day and walked for miles in all weather
through the woods in her favorite cos-
tume of loose peasant trousers. When
Bonheur is written about—then as
now—invariably the trousers feature.
Cross- dressing was illegal in France at
the time: an 1800 statute had sharply
restricted women’s rights, including
what they were allowed to wear, but
Bonheur received a rare permission de
travestissement—official permission to
cross- dress.^2 It was granted on hygienic
grounds, so that she would not have to
sully her skirts with mud or manure as
she worked.
Bonheur had first adopted trousers
to avoid harassment from men she en-
countered while out sketching. “Her
strong face and short hair lent them-
selves admirably to this disguise,” one
relative recalled. “Rosa was everywhere
taken for a young man.” The garments
proved congenial, and she soon wore
them routinely at home. In the woods
or when traveling, she added a revolver.
Bonheur’s retreat to Fontainebleau
cost her some currency in the Paris art
scene. She stopped exhibiting in the Sa-lons, in part because Gambart and her
Paris dealer, Tedesco, snapped up most
of her new work for foreign buyers. In
France, while the honors piled up and
fashionable people interrupted her
studio hours, she became a respected
elder rather than a living influence on
younger artists.
After Bonheur’s death in 1899, de-
mand for her work fell as modernism
took hold. By World War I, her paint-
ings, along with the entire animalier
genre, seemed hopelessly passé. She was
excluded from the standard art history
texts, beginning with Helen Gardner’s
Art Through the Ages, first published in1926.^3 Though included in Judy Chica-
go’s The Dinner Party (1979), she didn’t
merit a place setting of her own. The
critic Robert Hughes referred to her as
“the French cattle painter Rosa Bon-
heur” and pointed to her career
as an example of inflated valua-
tions that bottomed out.
In her 1971 essay, “Why Have
There Been No Great Women
Artists?” Linda Nochlin ob-
served that successful artists
like Bonheur were often cited to
justify limited opportunities for
women: if she could reach such
heights almost unaided, women
clearly weren’t hindered by
their exclusion from the best art
schools and high- profile awards
like the Prix de Rome. Bonheur’s
challenge to gender stereotypes
was nevertheless the main lens through
which contemporaries saw her. While
Gautier declared her “at the very top
of the field of animal painting,” most
critics lauded her in the usual terms
accorded gifted women: “Mlle Bon-
heur paints almost like a man” (Thoré
again). Sadly, Hewitt uncritically reiter-
ates what became a standard dichotomy
between Rosa’s “masculine” manner
and ambition and her “feminine” tech-
nique. “She looked and behaved like a
boy but when she drew, she did so with
feminine sensitivity,” she writes; Bon-
heur “possessed the stamina of a man
and the delicacy of touch of a woman.”
More surprising is that Bonheur’s
gender presentation sparked so little
objection during her lifetime. (She was
once arrested because police assumed
she was a cross- dressing man.) To some
extent, her trousers may have made
sense to critics for whom genius did
have a sex. As Germaine Greer wrote,
“It was thought that Bonheur had es-
chewed her sexuality altogether and
become great as a result.”
In some respects, Bonheur followed
one of her literary heroes, George
Sand, who wore trousers to get into
men’s clubs and other places closed to
her as a woman. But Bonheur shunned
the kind of notoriety Sand courted. “If
you see me dressed this way, it is not
in the least to make myself stand out,
as too many women have done,” sheRosa Bonheur’s studio, 1862New York Public Library(^2) Incredibly, the cross- dressing law
remained on the books, if largely ig-
nored, until 2013.
(^3) Granted, Bonheur was in a large,
boisterous company of the forgotten:
not a single woman made it into Art
Through the Ages or the later stan-
dard textbook, H.W. Janson’s History
of Art (1962). Gardner’s 1936 edition
briefly mentioned Mary Cassatt and
Georgia O’Keeffe, but Bonheur only
finally made it into the seventh edition,
published in 1976. She was excluded
from Janson’s until the eighth edition
in 1987—like all other women artists.
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