Rosa Bonheur
A closer look at Rosa Bonheur's life, work and connections to the Royal Family.
By Alex Buck, Assistant Curator of Paintings
Reading time: 6 minutes
Rosa Bonheur was a skilled and celebrated French animal painter. Her precocious talent, unconventional lifestyle and love of animals, makes her one of the most radical and interesting artists of the 19th century.
Life and Career
Rosa Bonheur was born in Bordeaux in 1822. Described as a ‘disruptive’ child in school, she loved sketching and at a young age was trained by her father, Raymond, a practicing artist. As a member of the socialist movement the Saint-Simonians, he believed in the equality of women; both her brothers and her sister became artists or sculptors.
Instruction from her father allowed her to receive an artistic training at a time when it was difficult for women to attend art schools or academies. For example, the influential École des Beaux-Arts (School of Fine Arts) in Paris did not admit women until 1897.
At a young age, Bonheur sketched live domestic animals, both in the studio and on the outskirts of Paris. She visited slaughterhouses to make anatomical studies, and copied works in the Louvre Museum - an activity which formed an important part of an artist’s training. Bonheur was one of the youngest people to study painting and sculpture at the Louvre.
Bonheur achieved early success with her painting, The Horse Fair. It was exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1853, and toured England and America, where it was widely praised. Learn more about The Horse Fair at The MET.
This monumental painting depicts lively horses being led through a tree-lined boulevard in Paris. The horses bristle with energy as they are accompanied by their handlers. To plan the composition, Bonheur gained police permission to dress as a man (wearing trousers with an artist’s smock and cutting her hair short), so that she could make studies at slaughterhouses and horse fairs in Paris. This avoided drawing undue attention while working in these unsavoury locations.
Genius has no gender
Empress Eugénie, on awarding Bonheur the Légion d’honneur in 1865
In June 1865, Bonheur became the first woman to be awarded France’s prestigious Légion d’honneur. This success gave her financial security and allowed her to buy the Château de By near Fontainebleau, where she lived with her partner, Nathalie Micas.
Royal collectors
She paints animals almost as well as Landseer
Diary of the Duke of York (future King George V), 1 May 1892
Bonheur’s work was admired by members of the Royal Family. While holidaying in Fontainebleau, Princess Beatrice, the youngest child of Queen Victoria, visited Bonheur at her home. She photographed the artist with her horse, Panther. Bonheur is recorded posing affectionately stroking her horse, dressed in a long smock and skirt with a second figure visible behind.
Some members of the Royal Family went on to purchase her drawings and paintings. When the famed painting of the Horse Fair joined the 1855 exhibition of French art at a gallery in Pall Mall, opened by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, Victoria ‘expressed a desire to see it and it was sent to Windsor’. This request boosted the popularity of the exhibition, with the Queen later purchasing a print of the painting. Queen Victoria evidently appreciated her work and acquired several drawings.
In July 1882 she wrote in her Journal of seeing
a beautiful picture by Rosa Bonheur, a lion, lioness & cubs (life-size) splendidly painted
Diary of Queen Victoria, 15 July 1882
This carefully observed drawing of a donkey was probably purchased after the artist’s death. In 1900, the Queen apparently sent her German secretary, Herr Müther, to a London gallery to try to buy ‘one of three little sketches’ from a recent exhibition of Bonheur's work. Learn more about Bonheur's drawing of a donkey.
The Paris Sale
A year after Bonheur’s death in May 1899, an enormous sale of her work took place in Paris. The New York Herald noted that the crowd that thronged the Petit Gallery when the sale began
was of quite a special character, the room being filled with foreigners of all nationalities.
The proceeds for the first day amounted to more than half a million francs. The event emphasises Bonheur’s popularity at the end of her life, with many, including Queen Victoria and her son Edward VII, keen to acquire the artist’s work.
A magnificent, and regal portrait of a lion’s head was purchased for Edward VII from the Paris sale. At her home and studio at the Château de By, Bonheur kept a menagerie (a collection of wild animals), which included stags, gazelles and lions who moved about freely. The biography of the artist’s life describes how young lions, kept in a ‘wagon like a cage’ with dividing bars, were fed by Bonheur and that ‘These lions were let loose later in an open courtyard where Rosa could sketch them’. They gradually became very tame. This setting enabled her to draw and paint with an understanding of anatomy and convey something of the animal’s individual character, power and beauty.
We know the Lion’s Head formed part of the enormous sale of Bonheur's work after her death because it bears a red wax impressed mark on the reverse. It is marked VENTE / 1900 / ROSA BONHEUR. Unusually, the signature on the lower right seems to be made by a stamp, rather than the artist’s hand. We think that these ‘stamped’ signatures were applied to paintings in the sale that were left unsigned after the artist’s death.
The painting was displayed in Buckingham Palace during Edward VII's reign and is recorded in the First Floor Library in Marlborough House in 1912. By this time Queen Alexandra was living there. Learn more about Bonheur's painting of a Lion's Head.
Legacy
A hugely popular, and renowned artist in her lifetime, Bonheur’s reputation declined until the late 20th century, when feminist art history started to emerge. Linda Nochlin’s radical 1971 essay Why have there been no great women artists? dedicates a whole chapter to Bonheur. This heralded the start of a re-evaluation of the careers, achievements and barriers faced by women artists, including Artemesia Gentileschi, Elizabeth Vigée Le Brun and Angelica Kauffman.
Today we celebrate Bonheur for her radical lifestyle, independence of spirit, sheer talent and empathetic portrayal of the animal world.
