May 12, 2022 45remarked late in life, “but only for
my work.” Yet it was not only for her
work: she habitually wore trousers at
home, and her biographers made much
of the dresses she changed into for vis-
its or travel; Bonheur loved to recount
her frantic struggles into a dress when
Empress Eugénie took to dropping by
unannounced. A neighbor recalled
that “what bored her most was going
to Paris, for it meant the discarding of
trousers, smock, and felt hat, as well as
the putting away of cigarettes.”
Hewitt does not touch on one rel-
evant midcentury cultural develop-
ment described by Henry James and
others: the circle of prominent Amer-
ican women artists in Rome, several
of whom (including Harriet Hosmer,
Emma Stebbins, and Mary Edmonia
Lewis) formed intimate partnerships
with women; some, like Hosmer, also
wore “mannish” clothes. Bonheur had
met Hosmer, eight years her junior, and
avidly followed her success.^4 She was
also connected to this circle through
the Welsh sculptor Mary Lloyd, Bon-
heur’s friend and former student, and
the partner of the British feminist
Frances Power Cobbe. The kind of
mutually supportive, woman- centered
idyll that Bonheur created with Micas
may have been a model for other ambi-
tious women.Art Is a Tyrant offers an orderly ac-
count of Bonheur’s life and career de-
spite the chaotic abundance of her two
main sources, both American: Theo-
dore Stanton’s Reminiscences of Rosa
Bonheur (1910) and Anna Klumpke’s
Rosa Bonheur: Sa vie, son oeuvre
(1908). Along with recalling his own
conversations with Bonheur, Stanton
(the son of Elizabeth Cady Stanton)
collected hundreds of letters and rem-
iniscences of the artist, producing a
413- page, closely printed cornucopia.
Bonheur regarded his questions as an
opportunity to set the record straight
and rattled on engagingly.
Similarly, when Anna Klumpke,
an American artist and Bonheur’s
companion in the last year of her life,
shared her journal with Bonheur—an
almost worshipful record of their days
together—she again took the chance to
correct earlier versions of her story, all
written by men. “The authors did not
know how to plumb the depths of her
mind,” Klumpke remarked, but “this
instinctive reserve vanished when she
faced a woman whose love and devo-
tion to her were sure.” The resulting
volume, translated by Gretchen van
Slyke as Rosa Bonheur: The Artist’s
(Auto)biography (1997), is a syrupy
but moving intergenerational love
story, as well as a fascinating “as told
to” autobiography of Bonheur from the
perspective of old age.
To these rich primary materials
Hewitt deftly adds political and cul-
tural background, weaving Bonheur’s
vivid recollections into fuller accounts
of, for example, the unrest of the
1830s (the Paris of Victor Hugo’s Les
Misérables) and the revolution in 1848,art market changes that saw the decline
of the government- controlled Salon sys-
tem, and the rise of the independent art
dealer, which brought Bonheur finan-
cial success. At her death, in addition
to the château, she left Klumpke almost
her entire estate: investments totaling
over 300,000 francs and thousands of
artworks worth over a million francs.
The stories Bonheur told Klumpke—
along with her somewhat combative
last will and testament—make it clear
that, despite all she had achieved, she
still felt embattled: if she failed to pro-
tect her hard- won wealth, the forces of
patriarchy (in the form of her greedy
nephews) would rush in. “My family
has always taken a dim view of my right
to live as I please,” she wrote in a testa-
mentary letter, justifying her decision
to leave most of her estate to Klumpke.
“Having done my duty by my family, I
was entitled, like any adult earning her
own living, to my independence.”
Several photos survive of Bonheur
with Micas, who was described by a
friend as “odd, original, and devoted.”
Hewitt includes the best of these, taken
in Bonheur’s studio in their late middle
age. Micas slumps unsmiling in an arm-
chair, with a little dog curled on her lap;
Bonheur stands behind her in a paint-
ing smock. Both eye the camera with
some skepticism. Micas dedicated her
life to Bonheur, had a secret bedroom
near hers in the château, and died in
her arms in 1889. Bonheur’s protracted
grief lasted until Klumpke, a success-
ful portraitist in her early forties who
had idolized Bonheur from childhood,
came to the château to paint her por-
trait in 1898. Soon Bonheur was writ-
ing to her, “I thought I’d buried love
with my poor Nathalie; but my old
heart has come back alive to the love I
see in your eyes.” Negotiations with the
Klumpke family to gain their permis-
sion for her to move in with Bonheur
read very much like marriage settle-
ment agreements.
Only months later, Bonheur died
in Micas’s bed with Klumpke’s arms
around her. As promised, Klumpke
preserved the château, which was
handed down through generations of
her family until its purchase by the
present owner.
“She used to make her own little cig-
arettes,” a friend recalled of Bonheur.When conversing in her studio,
she would often be engaged all the
time rolling them. Even when she
was as old as seventy- five, I have
seen her sitting up on the side of
her table... just like a young man,
with a smoking cigarette in her
hand. Her pretty little foot would
then slip conspicuously out from
under her trousers.Another friend recalled that when
Bonheur walked through the fields,
“the peasants returning from their
day’s labour would bow to this ‘little
man with his fine white locks.’”
Bonheur is buried in Père Lachaise
cemetery in Paris, with Micas and
Klumpke, who died in 1942. Shortly
before her death, Klumpke bequeathed
one of Bonheur’s “feminine outfits” to
the Fine Arts Museums of San Fran-
cisco: a black velvet and satin ensemble
of jacket, vest, and skirt, with sturdy
black petticoat; the Légion d’honneur
rosette was pinned to the front placket.
Not one pair of the famous trousers ap-pears to survive. (^) Q
THE UNCOLLECTED
ESSAYS OF
ELIZABETH HARDWICK
Edited and introduced by
Alex Andriesse
Paperback • $18.95
Also available as an e-book
On sale May 24th
“The clever observations of critic
and novelist Elizabeth Hardwick
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essays range from lyrical musings
on places Hardwick lived—Kentucky,
Maine, and New York—to insights
on literature and thoughts on
celebrities... This is a rousing
testament to Hardwick’s enduring
vision.” —Publishers Weekly
The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick is
a companion collection to The Collected Essays,
a book that proved a revelation of what, for many,
had been an open secret: that Elizabeth Hardwick
was one of the great American literary critics,
and an extraordinary stylist in her own right.
The thirty-five pieces that Alex Andriesse has
gathered here—none previously featured in
volumes of Hardwick’s work—make it clear that
her powers extended far beyond literary criticism,
encompassing a vast range of subjects, from New
York City to Faye Dunaway, from Wagner’s Parsifal
to Leonardo da Vinci’s inventions, and from the
pleasures of summertime to grits soufflé. In these
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see Hardwick’s passion for people and places,
her politics, her thoughts on feminism, and her
ability, especially from the 1970s on, to write
well about seemingly anything.
“Andriesse’s collection of 35 previously uncol-
lected essays... is well timed. In the first piece,
Hardwick writes that a ‘collection of essays is a
collection of variations,’ and these pieces show-
case her own range of interests... This judicious
gathering is a fine place to sample Hardwick’s
work.” —Kirkus Reviews
ALSO BY ELIZABETH HARDWICK
THE NEW YORK STORIES OF ELIZABETH HARDWICK
SLEEPLESS NIGHTS • SEDUCTION AND BETRAYAL
THE COLLECTED ESSAYS OF ELIZABETH HARDWICK
Available from booksellers and http://www.nyrb.com
LETTERS TO
GWEN JOHN
Celia Paul
Hardcover • $29.95
Color images throughout
Also available as an e-book
On sale April 26th
“Beautiful, tender, and riveting.
I have taken this book into my
heart.”—Claire-Louise Bennett,
author of Checkout 19
ALSO BY CELIA PAUL
SELF-PORTRAIT
Available from booksellers and nyrb.com
Celia Paul, Self-Portrait,
Early Spring, 2020
Gwen John, Self-Portrait,
with a Letter, 1907
“A miraculous, door-opening book.”
—Julia Blackburn, author of Time Song
Celia Paul’s Letters to Gwen John centers on a
series of letters addressed to the Welsh painter
Gwen John, who has long been a tutelary spirit
for Paul. John spent much of her life in France,
making art on her own terms and, like Paul, paint-
ing mostly women. John’s reputation was over-
shadowed during her lifetime by her brother,
Augustus John, and her lover Auguste Rodin.
Through the epistolary form, Paul draws compar-
isons between John’s life and her own: their
shared resolve to protect the sources of their
creativity, their fierce commitment to painting,
and the ways in which their associations with
older male artists affected the public’s reception
of their work.
Letters to Gwen John is at once an intimate corre-
spondence, an illuminating portrait of two painters
(including full-color plates of both artists’ work),
and a writer/artist’s daybook, describing Paul’s
first exhibitions in America, her search for new
forms, her husband’s diagnosis of cancer, and
the onset of the global pandemic.
“It’s a work of biography, analysis, reverence, and
supplication, and it’s filled with buoyant repre-
sentations of both Paul’s and John’s work. A
charge runs through it, the crackly static elec-
tricity of two connected souls touching hands
across a century.” —Hillary Kelly, Vulture
(^4) Hosmer’s marble sculpture Zenobia in
Chains (1859), now at the Huntington
Gallery in California, was a triumph at
the 1862 Great London Exhibition—
and a shock to critics, who believed
women could not sculpt stone; some
at first argued that Zenobia must have
been made by a man.
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