GENERAL DESCRIPTION
Rosa Bonheur, a celebrated Realist painter, was born in Bordeaux, France, in 1822. Her father, the landscape artist Raymond Bonheur, was particularly supportive of her career and began instructing her at the age of 13. Bonheur would extend this early training by making copies of Old Masters in the Louvre in Paris, where the family had relocated in 1829. Encouraged by her father to draw directly from life, Bonheur started specializing in the realistic portrayal of animals and immediately developed a profound love for them. Her vocation as an animal painter was unconventional for women, who were encouraged to focus on the genres of still life and portraiture. Nevertheless her father’s radical socialist views encouraged her independence and drive to pursue her career with confidence. She cut her hair short and petitioned police to allow her to wear pants in order to visit and study animals in locales off limits or prohibitive to women wearing skirts, such as horse fairs and slaughterhouses. From these studies she produced her best-known work, The Horse Fair (Metropolitan Museum of Art), a showpiece of animal flesh, movement, and painterly virtuosity that was presented at the 1853 Salon to great acclaim. Works like these and the prints after them made Bonheur enormously successful and popular, and this notoriety was in no small way augmented by her unabashed lifestyle of cross-dressing, cigarette smoking, and outspoken opinion.
Having never married, Bonheur was free to focus solely on her career, and her reputation grew throughout the 1840s. She exhibited her paintings and sculptures of animals regularly at the Paris Salon in the 1840s and early 1850s, winning third prize in 1845 and a gold medal in 1848. Seeking a quieter life in her mature years, she purchased a chateau on the edge of the Fontainebleau Forest, where, with her lifelong companion Nathalie Micas, she kept a menagerie of domestic and wild animals. There she received a steady stream of visitors, including the American William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody and the Empress Eugénie, who made Bonheur the first woman to receive the Legion of Honor in 1865. Bonheur would continue to paint until her death in 1899.
Excerpt from
Kelsey Martin and Nicole Myers, DMA exhibition text Women Artists in Europe from the Monarchy to Modernism, 2018.
NOTES
2014.32.FA
ASSOCIATED CONTENT CHUNKS
AUDIO ASSETS
VIDEO ASSETS
IMAGE ASSETS
Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain
WEB RESOURCES
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York~View the painting The Horse Fair by Rosa Bonheur.
- National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC~Learn more about the life and works of Rosa Bonheur.
ARCHIVAL RESOURCES
FUN FACTS
TEACHING IDEAS
RULES
apply to objects where constituent_id equals 104860
Category
rules_operator
AND
General Description
Rosa Bonheur, a celebrated Realist painter, was born in Bordeaux, France, in 1822. Her father, the landscape artist Raymond Bonheur, was particularly supportive of her career and began instructing her at the age of 13. Bonheur would extend this early training by making copies of Old Masters in the Louvre in Paris, where the family had relocated in 1829. Encouraged by her father to draw directly from life, Bonheur started specializing in the realistic portrayal of animals and immediately developed a profound love for them. Her vocation as an animal painter was unconventional for women, who were encouraged to focus on the genres of still life and portraiture. Nevertheless her father’s radical socialist views encouraged her independence and drive to pursue her career with confidence. She cut her hair short and petitioned police to allow her to wear pants in order to visit and study animals in locales off limits or prohibitive to women wearing skirts, such as horse fairs and slaughterhouses. From these studies she produced her best-known work, The Horse Fair (Metropolitan Museum of Art), a showpiece of animal flesh, movement, and painterly virtuosity that was presented at the 1853 Salon to great acclaim. Works like these and the prints after them made Bonheur enormously successful and popular, and this notoriety was in no small way augmented by her unabashed lifestyle of cross-dressing, cigarette smoking, and outspoken opinion.
Having never married, Bonheur was free to focus solely on her career, and her reputation grew throughout the 1840s. She exhibited her paintings and sculptures of animals regularly at the Paris Salon in the 1840s and early 1850s, winning third prize in 1845 and a gold medal in 1848. Seeking a quieter life in her mature years, she purchased a chateau on the edge of the Fontainebleau Forest, where, with her lifelong companion Nathalie Micas, she kept a menagerie of domestic and wild animals. There she received a steady stream of visitors, including the American William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody and the Empress Eugénie, who made Bonheur the first woman to receive the Legion of Honor in 1865. Bonheur would continue to paint until her death in 1899.
Excerpt from
Kelsey Martin and Nicole Myers, DMA exhibition text Women Artists in Europe from the Monarchy to Modernism, 2018.
Fun Facts
Archival Resources
Web Resources
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York~View the painting The Horse Fair by Rosa Bonheur.
- National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC~Learn more about the life and works of Rosa Bonheur.
Notes
2014.32.FA
source file
artists_and_designers-0022.xml.nores