Rosalie (Rosa) Marie Bonheur 1822 to 1899
Rosalie Marie Bonheur was born in Bordeaux, France on March 16th, 1822. She was the oldest of four children born to an impoverished French painter and all the four children became artists. Rosa began sketching at the age of four. She would go to the Paris horse market and sketch horses. In her adult life she was considered eccentric because she would go to slaughter houses where she would carefully study the muscles of cows and horses so that she could be exact with her drawing. At age eleven Rosa was sent to school to learn dressmaking, but she was sent home for misbehaving. The same thing happened at regular school. Her father finally let her stay home and create art work in their studio. Rosa’s father was her teacher as it was not possible for women to attend art schools at that time, which right was not granted in France until 1897.
When she was fourteen, Rosa went to the Louvre every day to study art. By the age of seventeen she was contributing to the family income by making copies of paintings in the Louvre. From 1840 at the age of eighteen and through 1845 she exhibited at the Paris Salon and five times received a prize. In 1848 a medal was awarded to her. Her most famous works are Ploughing in the Nivernais (1848), in the Luxembourg gallery; The Horse Fair (1853), one of the two replicas of which is in the National Gallery, London, the original being in the United States; and Hay Harvest in Auvergne (1855).
Rosa Bonheur was the first woman to win the French Legion of Honor, but Napoleon refused to give her the medal because she was a woman. The honor was bestowed upon her personally by the Empress Eugenie, wife of emperor Napoleon III, in June 1865 because the empress wanted to show, as she said, that “genius has no sex.” Several years later Rosa Bonheur moved to the country near Fontainebleau, and offered gratuitous drawing classes. She died in 1899 in Fontainebleau, and at her death left a considerable number of pictures, studies, drawings and etchings, which were sold by auction in Paris in the spring of 1900.
Information courtesy of Skinner, Inc., November, 2005.
Rosa Bonheur was born into a family of artists and progressive thinkers. Her father an artist himself, Oscar-Raymond Bonheur, was a believer in Saint-Simonianism, a Christian-socialist sect that promoted the education of women alongside men. Although she never received formal training, Rosa and all three of her siblings studied with their father. Rosa began by copying images of animals from books, models, and from the animals in the rural areas of Paris.
Revered for being an outspoken feminist, she wore pants, kept her hair short, and visited ‘manly’ places such as slaughterhouses and butcher shops, where she studied animal anatomy and osteology. Her paintings of animals met with great acclaim due to their realistic portrayals. Bonheur became famous as an animaliere and realist artist, even while the actual scenes of wildlife were rapidly disappearing due to the increasing industrialization of Europe.
Information courtesy of Heritage Auction Galleries, May, 2009.