Rosa Bonheur

Still regarded as one of the most important female artists, Rosa Bonheur was remarkable by the standards of almost any ear. A devout Realist, Bonheur hoped to democratize art by presenting subjects that the general viewer could comprehend and appreciate, taking her subject matter from everyday life. Her love and passion for animals and nature would go on to define her artistic career.

Bonheur was born in 1822, in Bordeaux, to a landscape painter who encouraged her artistic talents from an early age largely due to his adherence to Saint-Simonianism, which advocated for the equality of the sexes. Inspired by George Sand and with the permission of the French government, Bonheur cut her hair short and began dressing in men’s clothing in an effort to blend in at the slaughterhouses and horse fairs she would visit to study animal anatomy and movement for her paintings.

Bonheur also studied animal anatomy and osteology by performing dissections of animals at the National Veterinary Institute in Paris. On these visits she prepared detailed studies which she would later use as references for her paintings and sculptures. Eventually, she kept a small menagerie of her own, which expanded significantly in 1860 when she relocated to the Château de By in Thoméry, a village on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau. There, Bonheur was able to keep a variety of animals which served as the subjects of her paintings — among them cows, horses, sheep, boars, deers, lions and stags. 

As she grew older, Bonheur increasingly feared that the landscape and the lives of animals she so loved would be forever changed by the progress of modernity and the move away from pastoral life. Once she retreated to the Château de By, Bonheur devoted herself to the unrelenting study of painting these animals and landscapes. Her close and repeated studies of animals throughout her life enabled her to paint them with realistic presence and strength and exacting naturalism, but she also worked directly with the animals in her menagerie as her models, sometimes holding them in place through a rigging system so that she could paint in front of her model en plein air. Nature, Bonheur believed, was always true and beautiful.

Rosa Bonheur died in 1899, aged 77. Her influence extended beyond her artwork, and she remains an iconic figure as a trailblazing woman artist in the 19th century, her independent spirit and reluctance to bow down to societal conventions.