Rosa Bonheur Trivia | 85 facts about the French artist

Rosa Bonheur was a painter and a sculptor. Her paintings include “Ploughing in the Nivernais” and “The Horse Fair”.

So let’s find out some trivia and facts about Rosa Bonheur

1. Rosa Bonheur on 16 March 1822
2. She died on 25 May 1899
3. She was a French artist
4. She mostly was a painter of animals (animalière) but also a sculptor, in a realist style
5. Her paintings include Ploughing in the Nivernais, first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1848, and now at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris
6. And The Horse Fair (in French: Le marché aux chevaux), which was exhibited at the Salon of 1853 (finished in 1855) and is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City
7. Bonheur was widely considered to be the most famous female painter of the nineteenth century
8. Her birth name was Marie-Rosalie Bonheur
9. Bonheur was openly lesbian
10. She lived with her partner Nathalie Micas for over 40 years until Micas’s death
11. After which she began a relationship with American painter Anna Elizabeth Klumpke
12. Bonheur was born on 16 March 1822 in Bordeaux, Gironde
13. She was the oldest child in a family of artists
14. Her mother was Sophie Bonheur, a piano teacher
15. She died when Rosa was eleven
16. Her father was Oscar-Raymond Bonheur, a landscape and portrait painter who encouraged his daughter’s artistic talents
17. Though of Jewish origin, the Bonheur family adhered to Saint-Simonianism, a Christian-socialist sect that promoted the education of women alongside men
18. Bonheur’s siblings included the animal painters Auguste Bonheur and Juliette Bonheur
19. As well as the animal sculptor Isidore Jules Bonheur
20. Francis Galton used the Bonheurs as an example of “Hereditary Genius” in his 1869 essay of the same title
21. Bonheur moved to Paris in 1828 at the age of six with her mother and siblings, after her father had gone ahead of them to establish a residence and income there
22. By family accounts, she had been an unruly child and had a difficult time learning to read
23. Though she would sketch for hours at a time with pencil and paper before she learned to talk
24. Her mother taught her to read and write by asking her to choose and draw a different animal for each letter of the alphabet
25. The artist credited her love of drawing animals to these reading lessons with her mother
26. At school she was often disruptive, and was expelled numerous times
27. After a failed apprenticeship with a seamstress at the age of twelve, her father undertook her training as a painter
28. Her father allowed her to pursue her interest in painting animals by bringing live animals to the family’s studio for studying
29. Following the traditional art school curriculum of the period, Bonheur began her training by copying images from drawing books and by sketching plaster models
30. As her training progressed, she made studies of domesticated animals, including horses, sheep, cows, goats, rabbits and other animals in the pastures around the perimeter of Paris, the open fields of Villiers near Levallois-Perret, and the still-wild Bois de Boulogne
31. At fourteen, she began to copy paintings at the Louvre
32. Among her favorite painters were Nicolas Poussin and Peter Paul Rubens, but she also copied the paintings of Paulus Potter, Frans Pourbus the Younger, Louis Léopold Robert, Salvatore Rosa and Karel Dujardin
33. 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
34. There she prepared detailed studies that she later used as references for her paintings and sculptures
35. During this period, she befriended the father-and-son comparative anatomists and zoologists, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire
36. A French government commission led to Bonheur’s first great success, Ploughing in the Nivernais, exhibited in 1849 and now in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris
37. Her most famous work, the monumental The Horse Fair, was completed in 1855 and measured eight feet high by sixteen feet wide
38. It depicts the horse market held in Paris, on the tree-lined boulevard de l’Hôpital, near the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, which is visible in the painting’s background
39. There is a reduced version in the National Gallery in London
40. This work led to international fame and recognition
41. That same year she traveled to Scotland and met Queen Victoria en route, who admired Bonheur’s work
42. In Scotland, she completed sketches for later works including Highland Shepherd, completed in 1859, and A Scottish Raid, completed in 1860
43. These pieces depicted a way of life in the Scottish highlands that had disappeared a century earlier
44. They had enormous appeal to Victorian sensibilities
45. Bonheur exhibited her work at the Palace of Fine Arts and The Woman’s Building at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois
46. Though she was more popular in England than in her native France
47. She was decorated with the French Legion of Honour by the Empress Eugénie in 1865, and was promoted to Officer of the order in 1894
48. She was the first female artist to be given this award
49. Bonheur was represented by the art dealer Ernest Gambart (1814–1902)
50. In 1855 he brought Bonheur to the United Kingdom
51. He purchased the reproduction rights to her work
52. Many engravings of Bonheur’s work were created from reproductions by Charles George Lewis (1808–1880), one of the finest engravers of the day
53. In 1859 her success enabled her to move to the Château de By near Fontainebleau, not far from Paris, where she lived for the rest of her life
54. The house is now a museum dedicated to her
55. Women were often only reluctantly educated as artists in Bonheur’s day, and by becoming such a successful artist she helped to open doors to the women artists that followed her
56. Bonheur was known for wearing men’s clothing
57. She attributed her choice of trousers to their practicality for working with animals (see Rational dress)
58. Her romantic life was that of a lesbian
59. However, there is no confirmation that her relationships with women were sexual
60. She lived with her first partner, Nathalie Micas, for over 40 years until Micas’ death, and later began a relationship with the American painter Anna Elizabeth Klumpke
61. At a time when lesbian sex – particularly tribadism – was regarded as animalistic and deranged by most French officials, Bonheur’s outspokenness about her personal life was groundbreaking
62. In a world where gender expression was policed, Bonheur broke boundaries by deciding to wear trousers, shirts and ties, although not in her painted portraits or posed photographs
63. She did not do this because she wanted to be a man, though she occasionally referred to herself as a grandson or brother when talking about her family
64. Rather, she identified with the power and freedom reserved for men
65. Wearing men’s clothing gave Bonheur a sense of identity in that it allowed her to openly show that she refused to conform to societies’ construction of the gender binary
66. It also broadcast her sexuality at a time where the lesbian stereotype consisted of women who cut their hair short, wore trousers, and chain-smoked
67. Rosa Bonheur did all three
68. Bonheur never explicitly said she was a lesbian
69. But her lifestyle and the way she talked about her female partners suggests this
70. Until 2013 women in France were forbidden from wearing trousers by the “Decree concerning the cross-dressing of women” which was implemented on 17 November 1800
71. In 1852, Bonheur had to ask permission from the police to wear trousers, as this was her preferred attire to go to the sheep and cattle markets to study the animals she painted
72. Bonheur, while taking pleasure in activities usually reserved for men (such as hunting and smoking), viewed her womanhood as something far superior to anything a man could offer or experience
73. She viewed men as stupid and mentioned that the only males she had time or attention for were the bulls she painted
74. Having chosen to never become an adjunct or appendage to a man in terms of painting, she decided she would be her own boss and that she would lean on herself and her female partners instead
75. She had her partners focus on the home life while she took on the role of breadwinner by focusing on her painting
76. Bonheur’s legacy paved the way for other lesbian artists who didn’t favour the life society had laid out for them
77. Bonheur died on 25 May 1899, at the age of 77, at Thomery (By), France
78. She was buried together with Nathalie Micas (1824 – 24 June 1889), her lifelong companion, at Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris
79. Klumpke was Bonheur’s sole heir after her death
80. And later joined Micas and Bonheur in the same cemetery upon her death
81. Many of her paintings, which had not previously been shown publicly, were sold at auction in Paris in 1900
82. However, that same year it was part of a series of paintings sent to China by the French government for an exhibition titled “The French Landscape and Peasant, 1820–1905”
83. Since then her reputation has been somewhat revived
84. One of Bonheur’s works, Monarchs of the Forest, sold at auction in 2008 for just over $200,000
85. On 16 March 2022, Google honoured Bonheur with a Doodle to mark the bicentennial of her birth