Episode #64: The Coolest Artists You Don't Know: Rosa Bonheur (Season 7, Episode 4)

May 18, 2020 Jennifer Dasal

ARTCURIOUS: Stories of the Unexpected, Slightly Odd, and Strangely Wonderful in Art History is available for preorder now! Coming September 15, 2020 from Penguin Books.

For most Americans, there’s a list of arts that they might be able to rattle off if pressed to name them off the top of their heads. Picasso. Michelangelo. Leonardo da Vinci. Name recognition does go a long way, but such lists also highlight what many of us don’t know-- a huge treasure trove of talented artists from decades or centuries past that might not be household names, but still have created incredible additions to the story of art. It’s not a surprise that many of these individuals represent the more diverse side of things, too-- women, people of color, different spheres of the social or sexual spectrum.

This season on the ArtCurious podcast, we’re covering the coolest artists you don’t know. This week: Rosa Bonheur.

For more information on this artist, check out The Art Story: Rosa Bonheur Biography and Legacy

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Episode Credits

Production and Editing by Kaboonki. Theme music by Alex Davis. Social media assistance by Emily Crockett and Caroline Haller. Additional writing and research by Adria Gunter.

ArtCurious is sponsored by Anchorlight, an interdisciplinary creative space, founded with the intent of fostering artists, designers, and craftspeople at varying stages of their development. Home to artist studios, residency opportunities, and exhibition space Anchorlight encourages mentorship and the cross-pollination of skills among creatives in the Triangle.

Additional music credits

Recommended Reading

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Links and further resources

The Art Story: Rosa Bonheur Biography and Legacy

Art UK: Ten Reasons to Love Rosa Bonheur

Hyperallergic: 160 Years Before the Frida Kahlo Barbie, a Rosa Bonheur Doll Celebrated a Queer Woman Painter

Episode Transcript

During my first year of graduate school, I struggled to figure out my topic for my upcoming master’s thesis. I loved so many different arts and artists, and I didn’t know what to do. But like many of the best things in life, the idea just happened to me. While taking a course on 18th century art, I fell in love with the theory of the sublime as originally developed by philosopher Edmund Burke. Burke envisioned the Sublime as a feeling of such awesomeness, such grandeur, that it cannot be comprehended, really-- a greatness past human logic or measurement, and so much so that a feeling of terror, or a sensation of pure inadequacy would accompany it. I was obsessed with this theory and loved seeing its incarnations by artists like Henry Fuseli, Joseph Wright of Derby, Caspar David Friedrich, and others, moving into the 19th century with Theodore Gericault and JMW Turner, the stars of our 51st and 36th episodes, respectively. It’s still a topic in art that drives me wild. But I noticed, those many years ago, that there was something missing-- women. I even asked one of my professors to help me identify female painters tackling the Sublime, but no one came to mind. Until another professor said to me, “Well, you might consider this one artist. Her images of horses running ferociously through a stadium-like setting are something, to say the least.” So armed with a name and a vague idea, I went to the library and checked out my first book on Rosa Bonheur. And what I learned about her is that she is one serious badass painter, a woman who should get far more name recognition now than ever, even if some consider her to be “only” a painter of animals.

Some people think that visual art is dry, boring, lifeless. But the stories behind those paintings, sculptures, drawings and photographs are weirder, crazier, or more fun than you can imagine. In season seven, we’re uncovering the coolest artists you don’t know, and today, we’re focusing on an artist very close to my own heart. World, get to know Rosa Bonheur. This is the ArtCurious Podcast, exploring the unexpected, the slightly odd, and the strangely wonderful in Art History. I'm Jennifer Dasal.

“I was not yet four when I conceived a veritable passion for drawing, and I bespattered the white walls as high as I could reach with my shapeless daubs,” reminisced Rosa Bonheur about her upbringing. She continued in her memoirs, recalling, quote, “ Another great amusement was to cut objects out of paper. They were always the same, however: I would begin by making long paper ribbons, then with my scissors, I would cut out, in the first place, a shepherd, and after him a dog, and next a cow, and next a ship, and next a tree, invariably in the same order. I have spent many a long day in this pastime.” Unquote.

Truly both an interest in art and an interest in animals came obviously early to Marie-Rosalie Bonheur, called Rosa, who was born on March 16, 1822 in Bordeaux, France. And longtime listeners, you know the drill here: a woman who grows up to be a creative type prior to the 19th and 20th century has some familial help, exposure, and support. In Rosa’s case, it came from both sides of her family: her father, Raimond, painted and taught drawing lessons, while her mother, Sophie, taught lessons in music. Rosa thus received her first artistic education in her father’s own studio, where she would watch him closely as he painted or drew. He was the most supportive of fathers, too, always stopping to share his techniques with her and patiently answering her many questions. And Rosa would mirror him, playacting her own role as an artist. There’s a very sweet story about Rosa as a child where Raimond would welcome subjects into his studio to sit for a portrait, and Rosa would be right there, nearby, posing her dolls as if they, too, were getting ready to sit for their portraits.

In the early 1820s, the Bonheur family made good friends with another nearby family, the Slivela family, who originally hailed from Spain. When the Slivelas moved to Paris from the Bordeaux countryside, their correspondence back to the Bonheur family was rapturous-- it was the place to be, and the opportunities for artists there! Oh, it couldn’t be beat. So Papa Raimond moved to the big city, and his family, which by now also included Rosa’s brothers Auguste and Isidore, followed in 1828, when Rosa was six years old.

By the time she turned seven, Rosa was placed in an all-boys school directly below the building they lived in, a fascinating choice of education encouraged by the family’s belief in Saint-Simionism, a kind of political/religious sect that placed the equality of women, especially in education, as a huge priority. It was at the all-boys school that she acquired rather boyish manners and likings, something that she would retain for the rest of her life. It also was the place where it was quickly made evident that Rosa was not an ideal student. She was quick to anger and disruption, slow to read, and preferred to spend her time doodling. Her mother, Sophie, attempted to use this proclivity toward drawing to her advantage, asking Rosa to practice reading and writing the alphabet by drawing little sketches of animals next to each associated letter. Art and animals: for Rosa Bonheur, they would always be connected.

Things were bumpy there for a while, though, in Paris of the 1830s. The Bonhers lived through the city-wide turmoil of the July Revolution, a four-day long event that resulted in the overthrow of the French Bourbon monarchy. The family also moved repeatedly during the next couple of years, uprooting time and again, all while adding to their brood: sister Juliette arrived in 1830, and the baby, sister Isabelle, not long after. But the worst was when their mother, Sophie, passed away in 1833, all while their father was struggling to make a steady income due to the upheaval of the July Revolution. By the late 1830s, Raimond needed his young daughter to pitch in on the family finances, and plus, he wanted to find a way to keep her occupied.

After originally envisioning a long-term path towards some kind of business for his daughter, Raimond first subjected Rosa to learn dressmaking, and that didn’t go well. He then tried to enroll her in a different school and get her more focused on academics, but her antics and desires to play all-too-real games of combat, warfare, and cavalry charges led her to be expelled before she could even finish her second day. At his wit’s end, Raimond finally allowed her access to his studio, just as she had when she was very young. And that was it. That made her life’s dream happen, the passion that would charge her work for the rest of her life. Rosa Bonheur drew and painted everything within arm’s reach, and when her father arrived home to his studio one day, he came across an easel holding a small painting of cherries, which she had completed not long before. He was immediately struck by her ability to convey nature with such realism, and he encouraged her to “work seriously” so that she may “become an artist.”

Such serious work now meant that Rosa Bonheur needed to create opportunities for herself to observe and sketch the world around her. The Bonheur family home during her teenage years was in the 8th arrondissement in Paris, located near these vast, open pastures that stretched as far as the eye could see. Luckily for Rosa, this meant having immediate access to farms stocked, as she later said, “with cows, sheep, pigs, and poultry” and Bonheur would spend entire days watching the animals, studying their every movement and facial expressions. She also tried her hand at dissecting animals in an attempt to better understand their anatomies so that her renderings would be more lifelike, but she did not enjoy this very much, understandably so. Instead, she turned to making clay and wax models of animals, which also established in her a secondary interest in sculpture. This, along with her father’s tutelage and a period of study at art school at the Louvre, prepared her for her path in life: Rosa Bonheur would paint animals.

In 1841 at the age of just 19, Rosa achieved something rather important: she submitted two works to that year’s Salon, and both were accepted and exhibited there. If you recall our episode on the rivalry between John Constable and JMW Turner, then you’ll remember that acceptance and exhibition at the Salon was one of the biggest deals in European art at that time, a long art showcase that could make or break careers, turning people, like Turner just 9 years beforehand, into a superstar. For Rosa, it wasn’t quite the career-making turn as it was for Turner, but it did allow her to get a little attention and spurred her on to further submit to the Salon on an annual basis. Slowly, she began to build a following and a larger portfolio, using her art sales to fund travels across France and beyond where she continued studying her various animal subjects in new and exciting ways.

Things were progressing nicely in Bonheur’s personal life, too. In 1842, just a year after her inclusion in her first Salon, she received a commission to paint a portrait of a girl named Nathalie Micas. Natalie was eight years younger than Bonheur, but they bonded immediately, forming a partnership that would go on to span decades. Bonheur was welcomed into the extended Micas family, and Nathalie became a part of Bonheur’s daily life, acting as her closest confidante, assistant, and love. And with the support of Nathalie as a loving partner, who essentially managed Bonheur’s household so that she could afford to work as a professional artist in a time where women doing so was not the norm, Rosa Bonheur improved significantly in technique and appeal, continually creating work both for general consumption and for Salon consideration. And it was the Salon of 1849 that made all the difference-- the exhibition that could catapult Rosa Bonheur to become a household name.

That’s coming up next, right after this break.

Welcome back to ArtCurious.

In 1849, Rosa Bonheur received the opportunity to present herself as an option for a prestigious commission from the French government. For the commission, she produced a painting depicting the Charolais cattle of a province known as the Nivernais, which is today in central France. The Nivernais was a huge agricultural region prized for Charolais cattle, long seen as integral to ploughing and preparing the land for farming. Such an image, with the government’s approval, could almost be read as a marketing ploy or advertisement for the good works of the region in providing for the food and drink needs of the country. But for Bonheur, it became so much more than that-- it became about praising the animals, as much, or more than, their human counterparts in their efforts to assist humankind. Bonheur’s painting, titled Ploughing in the Nivernais, beautifully depicts twelve of these Charolais oxen ploughing the land for the first stage of the year’s soil preparation. A group of six oxen in the foreground comprise the main focal point of the work, while the remaining six can be seen making their way up the hill. The farmers are barely visible behind the strong, hulking bodies of the cattle, and my eyes barely clock their involvement here. That’s how much Bonheur draws our attention to the animals. So rather than celebrating humankind’s appropriation of land, Rosa wished to solely focus on nature’s great gifts to humankind.

And not only did it work well for the French Government in terms of the commission, it also worked for her. Ploughing in the Nivernais won Bonheur a First Place medal in that year’s Salon, which solidified her already solid reputation as a legitimate, skilled artist. Her fame skyrocketed to new heights, and certainly there must have been a point in which it seemed impossible for her to become even popular. And yet she did. In 1852, she began work on a monumental painting-- a painting that is nearly two-thirds life size, of a scene she witnessed at least once a week for practically two years before beginning to set paint to canvas. Beginning in 1850, Rosa Bonheur frequently visited a horse market on the Boulevard de l'Hôpital, a tree-lined thoroughfare in Paris not terribly far from the famed (and infamous, really) Salpêtrière hospital. There, she witnessed the parading of horses-- especially large workhorses like the ones she would eventually depict, a breed called Percherons. Around and around these horses ran, shown off to their full muscular extent by their dealers. It was a scene that had a lasting effect on the artist, a scene she simply had to replicate for herself. But first she had to even get into that horse fair in 1850 to begin with, which is a whole other side issue-- you see, such places like these horse fairs, and the slaughterhouses that Bonheur also occasionally visited, were male-only spaces, with women being forbidden--for their own good, supposedly, due to their (ahem) delicate demeanors--from entering these places. And where they weren’t forbidden to enter, women were nevertheless highly and vocally discouraged. But Bonheur was adamant. She needed to do her proper research and actually watch the animals in action at the horse fair. So she went to the police to gain access, and by doing so, procured for herself a so-called permission de travestissement-- literally, a cross-dressing permit--so that she could legally wear pants and enter the fair-- not just because walking around in mud and horse poop would be way easier (and far more sanitary) than in long, ground-brushing skirts, but because wearing trousers would act as a kind of armor-- Bonheur could blend in, hide herself a little bit, blending into the crowd of other pants-wearing folks so that she wouldn’t get harassed for simply being there. To even get to the point of being ready to make this painting was a big deal. But it paid off. Really. really paid off.

Completed in 1853, The Horse Fair was the biggest milestone of her entire career, and as with Ploughing in the Nivernais, this work is all about the power of animalkind, the struggle between humans and nature, all made visible in the wildness of Bonheur’s horses and their refusal to be tamed. There is not a still moment in this image, and the swirling sense of movement--and just barely contained chaos-- is palpable, made even more intense by the fact that it is a HUGE work-- approximately 8 feet tall by 16 1/2 feet wide, a size that, at about ⅔ life size, practically engulfs us as viewers. You can almost feel the wind that whips the horses’ manes, the thundering of their stamping hooves, and it is sublime. Sublime in that Edmund Burke sense, that feeling of our own powerlessness against the forces of nature. About a work completed later in her life, Bonheur expressed her wish to, quote, “show the horses snorting fire and dust welling up around their hooves. I want this infernal waltz, this wild tornado to make people’s heads spin. Even at high noon they’ve got to hear an echo of the horses treading up a great storm.” Unquote. I think that description applies perfectly here, with The Horse Fair, too. This work is a sensational achievement.

Many others thought so at the time, too. While it didn’t win an award at the 1853 Salon, it did receive a considerable amount of attention and heapings of critical praise, even if some did judge the work for its, quote, “masculine qualities.” unquote. It was even popular enough that two exhibitions of the work were held in the years following-- one in Ghent, Belgium, and the other back in France, in Bordeaux. But after that, another big opportunity came a-calling, and that was for a two-year-long tour of the painting in Great Britain, where it was outlandishly beloved by those animal-loving Brits, including famed art critic John Ruskin and artist Edwin Landseer, himself one of the most important animal painters of the century. Even Queen Victoria requested, and naturally received, a personal viewing of the work of art and an audience with Bonheur. All of this had a significant financial uptick for Bonheur, too, who fulfilled several requests for copies and smaller versions of the work of art, as well as allowing for prints to be made of the work and sold off, which meant that the further influence and love of The Horse Fair only continued to grow. Eventually, the work ended up for sale, where it found its way finally into the hands of the Vanderbilt family, and it was Cornelius Vanderbilt II who donated it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1887. It has been lovingly housed there ever since, and I personally make a pilgrimage to see it on each and every visit I make to New York.

The success of The Horse Fair, while basically setting up Bonheur for life, financially-speaking, did have its downsides. By the late 1850s, Bonheur was tired of the spotlight, tired of the increasing demands on her time and her person, and she wanted to step back a bit. That year, she bought a chateau and several outbuildings in the small town of By, today about an hour’s drive south of Paris. She built a studio there and happily painted there for forty years, living alongside Nathalie Micas and their menagerie of animals. Life was much quieter during the second half of her life, wherein she enjoyed staying at home in By and inviting friends over to “smoke cigarettes and chat by the fire,” as noted on The Art Story’s site. There was a memorable and seriously awesome moment of excitement, though, when Eugenie, the last Empress of France, arrived at By to present the artist with the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor, a merit award established by Napoleon himself and still in existence today. This was the highest honor of the land, and think of what it signified that not only was it given to a female artist--Bonheur-- but that the Empress herself visited By to bestow it upon her? Rosa Bonheur didn’t go to the Empress-- the Empress came to her. Come on, that’s badass.

The roughest time in Rosa Bonheur’s life was undoubtedly in 1889 and the years just after. Nathalie Micas, her partner of decades, died in 1889, and Bonheur, quite understandably, grieved heavily, reporting to a friend, quote, “how hard it is to be separated...she alone knew me, and I, her only friend, knew what she was worth." From all accounts, including Bonheur’s own, it took a couple of years to get back to feeling any semblance of positivity. By the mid-1890s, though, things felt better. And they continued to get better after Bonheur kindly accepted a request to sit for a portrait by the young American painter Anna Klumpke, and it was with Klumpke where Bonheur found happiness again. Anna Klumpke became her partner and shared the last few years of Rosa Bonheur’s life, just as Nathalie Micas had before her, living and working alongside the great Rosa Bonheur before Bonheur’s death in May of 1899. Anna Klumpke lived another 40+ years past her partner, but after her own death, all three of these women were united, in death, at the famed Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. It’s there that Rosa Bonheur is interred alongside her two loves-- and you can go visit their gravesite today.

In the late 19th century, that big hullaballoo now known as Impressionism came along, and abstraction was born, Cubism and Futurism prevailed, and all things Modern have brought us to the brink of, if not forgetting about Rosa Bonheur, at least of not quite appreciating her the way that we should. Her works are extremely realistic, lifelike even, and they are indeed mostly paintings of animals. But perhaps we should be looking more towards the artist here instead of her artistic output to really determine Bonheur’s long-lasting importance. Due to her popularity, she was actually a household name, popular enough that in the 1860s, after the runaway success of The Horse Fair, porcelain “Rosa Bonheur” dolls were made and widely loved by children everywhere-- including, famously, a young Anna Klumpke, who adored her Rosa Bonheur doll while growing up in San Francisco. Bonheur was, and is, such an inspiration for women today to do and achieve great things, as well as to follow her own drum. With her cross-dressing permit, and her own sheer comfort in wearing pants, she has also been adopted by many as an example of rejecting the gender binary. Living in a time where gender expression was strictly controlled and quite literally policed, her assuming of traditionally “male” attire was nothing if not political, a feminist act before feminism was coined as a term. And she was dedicated to helping other women achieve greatness, too, calling womanhood the quote “sex to which I proudly belong and whose independence I shall defend to my dying day.” She succeeded her father as the director of a Parisian art school for girls until her decampment to By in the late 1850s, and after her death, Anna Klumpke managed her estate and opened the Rosa Bonheur Memorial School for Girls, further giving generations the head start needed to achieve their dreams of a career in art. All this, and many other reasons, are enough to keep Rosa Bonheur at the top of my list of the coolest artists out there.

Thank you for listening to the ArtCurious Podcast. This episode was written, produced, and narrated by me, Jennifer Dasal, with additional writing and research help by Adria Gunter. And for lots more wonderful facts, images, and quotes from the indelible Rosa Bonheur, check out The Art Story, a website that breaks down artists, artworks, periods and movements in a clear and concise way. Check them out at theartstory.org.

Our theme music is by Alex Davis at alexdavismusic.com, our logo is by Dave Rainey at daveraineydesign.com, and social media help is by Emily Crockett and Caroline Haller. Our production and editorial services are provided by Kaboonki. Our Audio production services are provided by Kaboonki, the silliest name in superb podcasts and video. Let them help you too at kaboonki.com. The ArtCurious Podcast is sponsored primarily by Anchorlight. Anchorlight is a creative space, founded with the intent of fostering artists, designers, and craftspeople at varying stages of their development. Home to artist studios, residency opportunities, and exhibition space Anchorlight encourages mentorship and the cross-pollination of skills among creatives in the Triangle. Please visit anchorlightraleigh.com.

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Check back in two weeks as we continue to explore the unexpected, the slightly odd, and the strangely wonderful in art history. to explore the unexpected, the slightly odd, and the strangely wonderful in art history.