7 Avenue du Général de Gaulle, 94700 Maisons-Alfort, France
Rosa attended the École nationale vétérinaire d'Alfort.
7 Avenue du Général de Gaulle, 94700 Maisons-Alfort, France
Rosa attended the École nationale vétérinaire d'Alfort.
National Order of the Legion of Honour
Rosa Bonheur was born on March 16, 1822 in Bordeaux, France. She was a daughter of Sophie (Marquis) Bonheur, a piano teacher, and Oscar-Raymond Bonheur, a painter, who encouraged his daughter's artistic talents. Rosa's siblings included Auguste Bonheur and Juliette Bonheur, both painters, and Isidore Jules Bonheur, a sculptor. Their mother, Sophie, died, when Rosa was eleven years old.
After Rosa failed apprenticeship with a seamstress at the age of twelve, she began to study art under tutelage of her father, who allowed his daughter to bring live animals to his studio for studying.
At the age of fourteen, she copied paintings at the Louvre in Paris. Her favorite painters included Peter Paul Rubens and Nicolas Poussin. Also, Bonheur studied animal anatomy and osteology in the abattoirs of Paris, and attended École nationale vétérinaire d'Alfort.
In 1841, Rosa Bonheur exhibited the works "Goats and Sheep" and "Rabbits Nibbling Carrots" at the Salon in Paris. She continued to exhibit there until 1855.
After the death of her father in 1849, Rosa became a director of the School of Drawing for Young Girls, a position, which allowed her to encourage young women to pursue artistic careers. At that time, her work rapidly gained popularity in the United States and Britain. The painting "The Horse Fair" (1853), is considered to be her masterpiece. In 1887, it was purchased by Cornelius Vanderbilt for a record sum and became one of her most widely reproduced works. Also, the work attracted the favorable attention of Queen Victoria of England, who invited Bonheur for a royal visit.
In the 1870's, she began to sketch lions. In her later career, Rosa was known for attending horse fairs, slaughterhouses and even participating in dissections to gain the most thorough and realistic understanding of animal anatomy.
During her lifetime, Rosa maintained a personal zoological garden, which included dogs, Icelandic ponies, deer, gazelles, monkeys, cattle, yak, boar and a lion. These animals became the subjects of many of Bonheur's works and provided her with great joy. She painted animals and pastoral scenes throughout the remainder of her career and continued to enjoy commercial and critical favor.
Rosa was a successful painter, who helped to open doors to women artists, that followed her. Her most famous work is "The Horse Fair". Another popular work featured the American celebrity Buffalo Bill Cody, whose wild west show visited France in 1889.
In 1865, she became the first female recipient of the French National Order of the Legion of Honour. Some time later, in 1894, Rosa was made an Officer of the same order.
Her work "Monarchs of the Forest" was sold for over $200,000 at auction in 2008.
Also, her paintings are kept in the collections of different important museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
Oxen Pulling a Cart
Noonday Rest
The Pyrenees
Landscape with Cattle
Royalty at Home
A Waggon and a Team of Horses
Going to Market
Three Wooly Sheep
Longhorn Bull in a Landscape
Ploughing Scene
Lion in a Mountainous Landscape
Haymaking in the Auvergne
Plowing in the Nivernais
Sheep in a Landscape
Barbouyo
The Return from the Mill
A Grey Horse in a Field
Sheep in the Highlands
Relay Hunting
Stag in an Autumn Landscape
Landscape with Deer
Sheep and a Lamb
Weaning the Calves
Couching Lion
Large Wooly Sheep (also known as Wether)
A Limier Briquet Hound
The Horse Fair (study)
Lion and Prey (also known as The Kill)
Sheep in a Mountainous Landscape
Four Boars in a Landscape
Roe Deer
Changing Pastures
Cattle at Rest on a Hillside in the Alps 1885
The Lion at Home
The Charcoal Burners
The Return from the Harvest
Repose
Cows Resting
Heads of Ewes and Rams
Boeufs du Cantal
Brizo, a Shepherd's Dog
Shepherd of the Pyrenees
Study of a Cow
Chamois
Wild Cat
Landscape
The Horse Fair
Sheep in a Landscape
Ploughing in the Nivernais, France
Study of a Lion
Stag and Doe in a Landscape
The Stag
Arab and a Dead Horse
Quotations:
"Art is a tyrant. It demands heart, brain, soul, body. The entireness of the votary. Nothing less will win its highest favor. I wed art. It is my husband, my world, my life dream, the air I breathe. I know nothing else, feel nothing else, think nothing else."
"My dream is to show the fire which comes out of the horses' nostrils; the dust which rises from their hooves. I want this to be an infernal waltz."
"Ah! If nations could only agree to employ their resources to perfect agriculture and improve transportation, and to bring all their girl children a good education, what an explosion of happiness there would be on earth!"
"I became an animal painter because I loved to move among animals. I would study an animal and draw it in the position it took, and when it changed to another position I would draw that."
"The point of departure must always be a vision of the truth. The eye is the route of the soul, and the pencil or brush must sincerely and naïvely reproduce what it sees."
"If we don't always understand animals, they always understand us."
"The horse is, like man, the most beautiful and the most miserable of creatures, only, in the case of man, it is vice or property that makes him ugly. He is responsible for his own decadence, while the horse is only a slave."
"But the suit I wear is my work attire, and nothing else."
Bonheur cut her hair very short and dressed in men's clothing, a mode of dress, which quickly became her regular style. She developed the traditionally male habit of smoking cigars. Also, Rosa never discussed her sexual preferences.
Rosa exhibited an intense love of animals from her earliest years.
Rosa Bonheur was never married, but had two female partners in her lifetime. The first one was Nathalie Micas. In 1899, Micas died, and the same year, Rosa met a young American painter, Anna Klumpke, with whom she corresponded for many years. Klumpke eventually traveled to France to paint Bonheur’s portrait, and the two artists remained together until Bonheur’s death.
