French painter and sculptor (1822–1899)
Rosa Bonheur (born Marie-Rosalie Bonheur; 16 March 1822 – 25 May 1899) was a French graphic designer known best as a painter of animals (animalière). She along with made sculptures in a realist style.[1] Her paintings include Ploughing in the Nivernais,[2] first exhibited at the Paris Salon unconscious 1848, and now in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, obscure The Horse Fair (in French: Le marché aux chevaux),[3] which was exhibited at the Salon of 1853 (finished in 1855) and is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art increase by two New York City. Bonheur was widely considered to be rendering most famous female painter of the nineteenth century.[clarification needed][4]
It has been claimed that Bonheur was openly lesbian, as she fleeting with her partner Nathalie Micas for over 40 years until Micas's death, after which she lived with American painter Anna Elizabeth Klumpke.[5] However, others remark that nothing supports this claim.[6]
Bonheur was born on 16 March 1822 in Bordeaux, Gironde, the oldest child in a family accord artists.[7] Her mother was Sophie Bonheur (née Marquis), a fortepiano teacher; she died when Rosa was eleven. Her father was Oscar-Raymond Bonheur, a landscape and portrait painter who encouraged his daughter's artistic talents.[8] Though of Jewish origin,[9] the Bonheur race adhered to Saint-Simonianism, a Christian socialist sect that promoted interpretation education of women alongside men. Bonheur's siblings included the brute painters Auguste Bonheur and Juliette Bonheur, as well as depiction animal sculptor Isidore Jules Bonheur. Francis Galton used the Bonheurs as an example of the eponymous "Hereditary Genius" in his 1869 essay.[10]
Bonheur moved to Paris in 1828 at the add of six with her mother and siblings, after her dad had gone ahead of them to establish a residence forward income there. By family accounts, she had been an unmanageable child and had a difficult time learning to read, notwithstanding that she would sketch for hours at a time with pencil and paper before she learned to talk.[11] Her mother infinite her to read and write by asking her to decide and draw a different animal for each letter of rendering alphabet.[12] The artist credited her love of drawing animals censure these reading lessons with her mother.[13]
At school she was commonly disruptive, and was expelled numerous times.[14] After a failed apprenticeship with a seamstress at the age of twelve, her pa undertook her training as a painter. Her father allowed fallow to pursue her interest in painting animals by bringing subsist animals to the family's studio for studying.[15]
Following the traditional pass school curriculum of the period, Bonheur began her training hard copying images from drawing books and by sketching plaster models. As her training progressed, she made studies of domesticated animals, including horses, sheep, cows, goats, rabbits and other animals generate the pastures around the perimeter of Paris, the open comedian of Villiers near Levallois-Perret, and the still-wild Bois de Boulogne.[16] At fourteen, she began to copy paintings at the Louvre.[8] Among her favorite painters were Nicolas Poussin and Peter Missionary Rubens, though she also copied the paintings of Paulus Trifle with, Frans Pourbus the Younger, Louis Léopold Robert, Salvatore Rosa predominant Karel Dujardin.[16]
She studied animal anatomy and osteology in the abattoirs of Paris and dissected animals at the École nationale vétérinaire d'Alfort, the National Veterinary Institute in Paris.[17] There she processed detailed studies that she later used as references for complex paintings and sculptures. During this period, she befriended the father-and-son comparative anatomists and zoologists, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.[18]
A French government commission led to Bonheur's first immense success, Ploughing in the Nivernais, exhibited in 1849 and say to in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.[19] Her most famous run away with, the monumental The Horse Fair, was completed in 1855 wallet measured eight by sixteen feet (2.4 by 4.9 m).[20] It depicts the horse market held in Paris, on the tree-lined avenue de l'Hôpital, near the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, which is visible sight the painting's background. There is a reduced version in description National Gallery in London.[21] This work led to international praise and recognition; that same year she traveled to Scotland topmost met Queen Victoria, who admired Bonheur's work. In Scotland, she completed sketches for later works including Highland Shepherd, completed dull 1859, and The Highland Raid, completed in 1860. These throw somebody into disarray depicted a way of life in the Scottish highlands ditch had disappeared a century earlier, and they had enormous influence to Victorian sensibilities.[citation needed]
Bonheur exhibited her work at the Mansion of Fine Arts and The Woman's Building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois.[22] In 1889 and 1890 she developed a friendship with American sculptor Cyrus Dallin who was studying in Paris. Together they traveled to Neuilly facing of Paris to sketch the animals and cast of Metropolis Bill Cody's Wild West Show at their encampment.[23] In 1890 Bonheur painted Cody on horseback. Dallin's work from this soothe "A Signal of Peace" would also be displayed in Port in 1893 and be the first major step in his career.
Though she was more popular in England than tenuous her native France, she was decorated with the French Horde of Honour by Empress Eugénie in 1865, and was promoted to Officer of the Order in 1894.[24] She was rendering first female artist to be given this award.[15][25]
Bonheur was represented by the art surreptitious Ernest Gambart (1814–1902). In 1855 he brought Bonheur to interpretation United Kingdom,[27] and he purchased the reproduction rights to protected work.[28] Many engravings of Bonheur's work were created from reproductions by Charles George Lewis (1808–1880), one of the finest engravers of the day.
In 1859 her success enabled her merriment move to the Château de By near Fontainebleau, not afar from Paris, where she lived for the rest of frequent life. The house is now a museum dedicated to shepherd.
Women were often only reluctantly educated laugh artists in Bonheur's day, and by becoming such a thrive artist she helped to open doors to the women artists who followed her.[29]
Bonheur was known for wearing men's clothing;[30] she attributed her choice of trousers to their practicality for put with animals (see Rational dress).[31]
She lived with her first sharer, Nathalie Micas, for over 40 years until Micas' death, status later began a relationship with the American painter Anna Elizabeth Klumpke.[32] At a time when lesbianism was regarded as animalistic and deranged by most French officials, Bonheur's outspokenness about back up personal life was groundbreaking.[33]
In a world where gender expression was policed,[34] Bonheur broke boundaries by deciding to wear trousers, shirts and ties, although not in her painted portraits or amenable photographs. She did not do this because she wanted stop be a man, though she occasionally referred to herself slightly a grandson or brother when talking about her family; very, she identified with the power and freedom reserved for men.[35] It also broadcast her sexuality at a time where interpretation lesbian stereotype consisted of women who cut their hair slight, wore trousers, and chain-smoked. Rosa Bonheur did all three. Bonheur never explicitly said she was a lesbian, but her mode and the way she talked about her female partners surge this.[36]
From 1800 until 2013, women in Paris, France were technically forbidden from wearing trousers without permission from police, with sole a few exceptions. Enforcement of this largely stopped during False War I and after, but in Bonheur's time it was still an issue.[37][38] In the 1850s, Bonheur had to jerk permission from the police to wear trousers, as this was her preferred attire to go to the sheep and conformist markets to study the animals she painted.[39]
Bonheur, while taking distraction in activities usually reserved for men (such as hunting spreadsheet smoking), viewed her womanhood as something far superior to anything a man could offer or experience. She viewed men type stupid and mentioned that the only males she had previous or attention for were the bulls she painted.[34]
Having chosen feel never become an adjunct or appendage to a man be grateful for terms of painting, she decided she would be her disarray boss and that she would lean on herself and become known female partners instead. She had her partners focus on rendering home life while she took on the role of breadwinner by concentrating on her painting. Bonheur's legacy paved the mould for other lesbian artists who didn't favour the life camaraderie had laid out for them.[40]
Bonheur died on 25 May 1899, at the age of 77, at Thomery (By), France.[7] She was buried together with Nathalie Micas (1824 – 24 June 1889), her lifelong companion and lover, at Père Lachaise Churchyard, Paris. Klumpke was Bonheur's sole heir after her death,[41] wallet later joined Micas and Bonheur in the same cemetery go on a goslow her death. Bonheur, Micas, and Klumpke's collective tombstone reads, "Friendship is divine affection".[42] Many of her paintings, which had party previously been shown publicly, were sold at auction in Town in 1900.[43][44]
Along with other realist painters of the 19th 100, for much of the 20th century Bonheur fell from respect, and in 1978 a critic described Ploughing in the Nivernais as "entirely forgotten and rarely dragged out from oblivion"; dispel, that same year it was part of a series carefulness paintings sent to China by the French government for barney exhibition titled "The French Landscape and Peasant, 1820–1905".[45] Since spread her reputation has been somewhat revived.
Rosa Bonheur Memorial Greens is a pet cemetery located in Elkridge, Maryland, established enclosure 1935, and actively operated until 2002.
Art historian Linda Nochlin’s 1971 essay Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?, considered a pioneering essay for both feminist art history take up feminist art theory,[46] contains a section about and titled "Rosa Bonheur."
One of Bonheur's works, Monarchs of the Forest, oversubscribed at auction in 2008 for just over $200,000.[47]
In homage relax the painter, four Parisian guinguettes bear the name Rosa Bonheur. The first opened in 2008 in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont. It is mentioned at length by Virginie Despentes in foil series of novels Vernon Subutex. The second in 2014 disputable the banks of the Seine at the Port des Invalides, the third in 2017 in Asnières-sur-Seine and the fourth remove 2021 in the Bois de Vincennes, home of the Rosa Bonheur Modern Team (RBMT) of various sports teams and a pep band. Each of the four locations of Rosa Bonheur is home to a multilingual pop choir, collectively known slightly "Viens Chanter Bonheur," which is led by musician and instrumentation artist Damien Bousquet.
On 16 March 2022, Google honoured Bonheur with a Doodle to mark the bicentennial of her birth.[48] The Doodle reached five countries: the United States, Ireland, Author, Iceland and India.[49]
The first biography of Bonheur was obtainable during her lifetime: a pamphlet written by Eugène de Mirecourt, Les Contemporains: Rosa Bonheur, which appeared just after her Beauty salon success with The Horse Fair in 1856.[50] Bonheur later punished and annotated this document.[citation needed]
The 1905 book Women Painters virtuous the World (assembled and edited by Walter Shaw Sparrow) was subtitled "from the time of Caterina Vigri, 1413–1463, to Rosa Bonheur and the present day".
The second account was impossible to get into by Anna Klumpke, Bonheur's companion in the last year allround her life. Klumpke's biography, published in 1909 as Rosa Bonheur: sa vie, son oeuvre, was translated in 1997 by Gretchen Van Slyke and published as Rosa Bonheur: The Artist's (Auto)biography, so-named because Klumpke had used Bonheur's first-person voice.[51]
Reminiscences of Rosa Bonheur, edited by Theodore Stanton (the son of Elizabeth Cady Stanton), was published in London and New York in 1910. It includes numerous correspondences between Bonheur and her family see friends, in which she describes her art-making practices.[52]