Rosa Bonheur

“ Rosa Bonheur was seventy-seven years of age, but in the enjoyment of robust health; her talent still [Pg 78] retained its unvarying power and her hand was still firm. Her age was not betrayed in any of her works, which had the appearance of having been painted in the flood-tide of youth. Such is the impression of critics before her painting, A Cow and Bull in Auvergne, Cantal Breed, which, contrary to her habit, she sent to the Salon. The praise was unanimous; they even talked of awarding her the medal of honour which she refused in a letter of great beauty and dignity. ”

“ One day on returning home, at the end of his day’s work, Raymond Bonheur discovered on the easel a little canvas representing a bunch of cherries, a well drawn canvas and excellently painted from nature. This was Rosa Bonheur’s first painting; it bore witness to a genuine artistic temperament. Her father was delighted, but he hid his pleasure.
[Pg 22]
“That is not so bad,” he allowed to Rosa. “Work seriously, and you may become an artist.”
This word of encouragement set the young girl’s heart to pulsing with emotion. Then it needed only application and courage? ”

“ A young American, Miss Anna Klumpke, who was an enthusiastic admirer of Rosa Bonheur, and who herself had some talent for painting, presented herself one day at By and begged the favour of an interview with the artist. The latter received her with her wonted graciousness. The conversation turned upon art. The young girl emboldened, by her hostess’s kindness, ventured to ask if she might come to take a few lessons, and at the same time showed a few sketches. Rosa Bonheur examined [Pg 76] them and discovered not merely promise, but what was better, an unmistakable talent. ”

“ Rosa Bonheur is an indefatigable worker. She rises at six, and paints until dusk, when she lays aside her blouse, puts on a bonnet and shawl of most unfashionable appearance, and takes a turn through the neighboring streets alone, or accompanied only by a favorite dog. ”

“ Rosa Bonheur.
Rosa Bonheur's home was in France. She was the eldest of four children. Her father gave lessons in drawing and made pictures [Pg 216] for books. The little cottage in which she was born was in a beautiful part of the country. Here, with her two younger brothers and a baby sister, she lived a happy life.
Rosa loved animals, and she had many pets. Dogs that had no home came to her, and they were never turned away. She fed the wild rabbits and tamed the squirrels. If a stray horse wandered by, it was given food and water, and cared for until its owner could be found. ”

“ From thence have risen most of the great modern names, one of the greatest and most honored being that of Rosa Bonheur, who has received all possible distinction as an artist and reverence as a woman. ”

“ I believe that, in spite of the large sums of money that she received, her habitual generosity and indifference to wealth prevented her amassing a large fortune, but her fame as an artist and her womanly virtues brought the rewards which she valued above any thing that wealth could bestow—such rewards as will endure through centuries and surround the name of Rosa Bonheur with glory, rewards which she untiringly labored to attain. ”

“ The young couple started upon married life with no other fortune than their mutual attachment and equal courage. He continued to teach drawing and she gave lessons in music. But before long she was forced to put an end to these lessons in order to devote herself to new duties. Indeed, it was less than a year after their marriage, namely on the 16th of March, 1822, that a little girl was born into the world: this little girl was Rosalie Bonheur, better known under the name of Rosa Bonheur. ”

“ Rosa Bonheur herself relates, “the recipients had to go in person to obtain their medals at the director’s office. I went, armed with all the courage of my twenty-three years. The director of fine-arts complimented me and presented the medal in the name of the king. Imagine his stupefaction when I replied: ‘I beg of you, Monsieur, to thank [Pg 30] the king on my behalf, and be so kind as to add that I shall try to do better another time.’”
Rosa Bonheur kept her word: her whole life was a long and sustained effort to “do better.” ”

“ Her talent was no longer open to question; everyone agreed in recognizing it. The critics saw in her far more than a conscientious and gifted artist; they regarded her as the inspired interpreter of rural life. “The work of Rosa Bonheur,” wrote Anatole de la Forge in 1855, “might be entitled the Hymn to Labour. Here she shows us the tillage of the soil; there, the sowing; further on, the reaping of the hay, and then that of the grain; elsewhere the vintage; always and everywhere, the labour of the field. ”

“ Rosa Bonheur worked with desperate energy in the midst of her models and delighted in portraying them in a setting of some one of those picturesque and impressive vistas of the forest of Fontainebleau, adjacent to her own residence. She was unremittingly productive; yet France hardly heard her name mentioned save as an echo of her triumphs abroad. England has gone wild over her paintings; and America was not slow in following suit. ”

“ Rosa Bonheur is the first woman who has dared venture into the field of animal painting, and her work not only surpasses anything ever done by a woman, but is a bold and successful step beyond all other artists. ”

“ This is the epoch from which dates that admirable series of wild beasts in which Rosa Bonheur manifests a power of expression and virility of execution that [Pg 68] she never before had occasion to display, and that seem absolutely incredible as coming from the brush of a woman. No other painter has rendered with greater truth and force the undulous and elastic movements of the panther or the tiger; Barye himself, in his admirable bronzes, has never endowed his lions with greater life or more majestic grandeur than Rosa Bonheur has done. ”

“ No less perfect is the canvas representing The Threshing of the Grain, which it took Rosa Bonheur twenty years to bring to completion. Over a field in which the sheaves of grain have been strewn, eleven horses, drawn life-size, are driven at full gallop, trampling the golden tassels under their powerful hoofs. The artist has rarely attained the height of perfection to which this picture bears witness. ”

“ Few painters have so far insisted upon this honesty, this conscientiousness, without which the most gifted artist remains incomplete. Whatever gifts he may be endowed with by nature, talent cannot be improvised; it is the fruit of independent and sustained toil. Later on, when she in her turn became a teacher, Rosa Bonheur was able to proclaim the necessity of line-work with all the more authority because it had always been the fundamental basis, the very scaffolding of all her works. ”

“ She also was an artist and took a studio adjoining that of her friend; several times she collaborated on Rosa’s canvases, when the latter was over-burdened with work. After Rosa had sketched her landscape and blocked in her animals, Mlle. Micas would carry the work forward, and Rosa, coming after her, would add the finishing touch of her vigorous and unfaltering brush. But to Rosa Bonheur Mlle. Micas meant far more as a friend than as a collaborator. ”

“ I must at once add that hasty canvases are extremely rare in the life work of Rosa Bonheur; she had too high a sense of duty to her art and too great a respect for her own name to slight any necessary work on a canvas. Certain pictures appear to have been done rapidly solely because the artist possessed among her portfolios fragmentary studies made from nature and drawn with scrupulous care, and all that she needed to do was to transfer them to her canvas. ”

“ Rosa Bonheur possessed a number of decorations, notably the Cross of San Carlos of Mexico which was given her by the Empress Charlotte, the Cross of Commander of the Order of Isabella the Catholic, the Belgian Cross of Leopold, the Cross of Saint James of Portugal, etc. The noble artist accepted these distinctions gratefully, but was in no way vain of them, for no woman was ever more simple or more modest than she. ”

“ She takes the animals in the environment in which they live, in the setting with which their form harmonizes, in short, in the conditions that have played an essential part in their evolution, and she records with inflexible sincerity what nature places beneath her eyes and what her patient study has permitted her to understand. It is more especially for this reason, among many others, that the work of Rosa Bonheur deserves to live, and that the eminent artist stands to-day as one of the most finished animal painters with which the history of our national art is honoured. ”

“ As the Empress Eugénie bent over and kissed Rosa Bonheur she pinned the Cross of the Legion of Honor on the artist’s blue blouse. Rosa did not notice it until after the Empress had left. She must have been very much pleased, for she was the first woman to receive that honor.
Questions to help the pupil understand the picture. Tell about Rosa Bonheur as a little girl. Where did she live the first ten years of her life? What pets did she have? Why were the children glad to go to Paris? why sorry? What pets did they take with them? Describe their first home in Paris. Tell about the wild boar ”

“ The fan leaf, ‘Le Cerf de St. Hubert,’ by Rosa Bonheur (born 1822, died 1897) , is dated 1896, and is consequently one of the latest works of this illustrious painter, whose fame has become universal. The legend of St. Hubert and his Christ vision, an unusual subject with modern artists, though greatly favoured by the painters of the Renaissance, engaged the attention of Rosa Bonheur as early as 1868, when she produced a crayon study, similar in treatment to this fan leaf, with the stag shown a little more in perspective, illustrated in Rosa Bonheur, sa Vie, son Œuvre, Anna Klumpke, 1908. ”

“ Notwithstanding these apparent defects, Rosa Bonheur stands for something higher in art than do most of her contemporaries. She was not influenced by the skilled and often corrupt technicians; she perfected her technique by study of the old masters and learned her art from Nature ”

“ According to artists, the lion is the most difficult of all animals to paint, on account of the prodigious mobility of his physiognomy. Rosa Bonheur was able, thanks to her inimitable art, to catch and reproduce the fugitive facial expressions of the kingly beast,—expressions that the artist succeeded in securing during a visit to a certain menagerie, and which she managed to record with a most surprising vigour and fidelity. ”

“ As a landed proprietor deeply attached to his ancestral acres, he appreciates paintings of rural life, less as an artist than professionally, as a gentleman-farmer who knows all the breeds of cattle and sheep and to whom Rosa Bonheur’s paintings were at this epoch veritable documents, quite as much as they were works of art. ”

“ Rosa Bonheur. Miss Lloyd, who knew her very intimately and had worked in her studio, gave me an introduction to her and I reported my visit in a letter to Miss Lloyd in Rome.
“Mdlle Bonheur received me most cordially when I sent up your note. She was working in that most picturesque studio (at By, near Thoméry) . I had fancied from her picture that she was so much taller and larger that I hardly supposed that it was she who greeted me, but her face is charming; such fine, clear eyes looking straight into one’s own, and frank bearing; an Englishwoman’s honesty with a Frenchwoman’s courtesy. ”

“ To the Teacher: The children may draw a picture of a lion. Use manila paper and charcoal. Call attention to the large, bushy head, cat-like body, and long, waving tail.
The story of the artist. Rosa Bonheur’s father was an artist, and when any one asked her who taught her to draw, she always said, “My father taught me.” Her mother could play the piano very well indeed, but Rosa did not care so much for that study. When Rosa was sent to school she had to walk some distance through the woods to the schoolhouse. ”

“ The general public admired, and so did the critics. It was only the jury that remained hostile towards [Pg 31] this independent and personal manner of painting, which ignored the established procedure of the schools and based itself wholly upon inspiration and sincerity; accordingly, they always took pains to place her pictures in obscure corners or at inaccessible heights. The public, however, which always finds its way to what it likes, took pains on its part to discover and enjoy them.
In 1848 Rosa Bonheur had her revenge. ”

“ In 1842 she sent three paintings to the Salon: namely, an Evening Effect in a Pasture, a Cow lying in a Pasture, and a Horse for Sale; and in addition [Pg 29] to these, a terra-cotta, the Shorn Sheep, which received the approval of the critics. And no less praise was bestowed upon her paintings, which showed a talent for landscape fully equal to her mastery of animal portraiture.
Her success was progressive. Her pictures in the Salon of 1843 sold to advantage and Rosa Bonheur was able to travel. ”

“ Many of her graduate pupils attained an honourable career in painting, and if no name worthy of being remembered is included among the whole number, the reason is that genius cannot be manufactured and that it was not within the power of Rosa Bonheur to give to her young pupils something of herself.
In 1860, the great artist, being overburdened with work and unable to carry on simultaneously the instruction and practice of her art, resigned her position as director. The school passed into the hands of Mlle. ”

“ The years which followed were equally unfortunate for Raymond Bonheur: Paris had hardly recovered from the shock of the Revolution, when in 1832 the cholera made its appearance. There was no further question of lessons, for everyone [Pg 19] thought solely of his own safety; the rich fled from the city, the others remained closely housed in order to avoid the fatal contagion. To escape the scourge, Raymond Bonheur once more changed his dwelling and established himself in the Rue du Helder. Variable and impulsive by nature, the painter delighted in change. ”