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Rosa Bonheur

The Knitting Circle: Art

Biography,work,bibliography.

French animal painter and sculptor

Born Marie-Rosalie Bonheur.

She had bohemian parents who made sure that she had the same comprehensive education as her brother. Her father, Raymond Bonheur, taught her to paint and sent her to the Louvre to copy works of the old masters, and he also encouraged her to visit farms and stables to sketch. She started to exhibit in official salons while she was still a teenager.

At the age of fourteen she began her friendship with Nathalie Micas who became an amateur inventor.

She exhibited at the Salon in 1841.

When she was 26 she won her first Gold Medal. It was awarded by a panel which included Corot, Delacroix, and Ingres.

She was, along with Edwin Landseer (1802-73), the most famous animal painter of the 19th. century. Her work is free of Landseer's anthropomorphic sentimentality.

The hugeThe Horse Fairwas exhibited at the Salon in 1853 and established her reputation. She made studies at the Marchéaux Chevaux in Paris dressed as a man and received formal policepermission de travestissementfrom the Paris Prefect's office.

She bought a chateau near Fontainebeau which she shared with Nathalie Micas, and a menagerie of exotic animals.

After Nathalie Micas's death in 1889 Rosa Bonheur established a relationship with the American artist Anna Elizabeth Klumpke (1856-1942) who she described as her "e;wife"e;. The three women's ashes are buried together in Père Lachaise Cemetary in Paris.

In 1865 she became the first woman to be awarded the Grand Cross of the Légion d'Honneur.

There is a Musée Bonheur at Fontainebeau, France.

There are good examples of her work in the Wallace Collection, London.

• Playing with Oxen, 1849, (in Luxembourg)

• The Horse Fair, 1853, (in the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA)
  A quarter-sized version is in the National Gallery, London.

• Self-portrait, (in the Uffizi, Florence, Italy)

• Dore Ashton and Denise Browne Hare, (1981), "e;Rosa Bonheur: A Life and Legend"e;, New York: Viking Press; London: Secker & Warburg, 206 pages.

• Albert Boime, (1981), "e;The Case of Rosa Bonheur: Why Should a Woman Want to Be Like a Man"e;,Art History, volume 4, pages 384-409.

• Emmanuel Cooper, (1994).

• Germaine Greer, (1979).
  Includes a colour plate ofThe Horse Fair.

• Anna Klumpke, (1908), "e;Rosa Bonheur"e;, Paris: Flammarion.

• Anna Klumpke and Gretchen Van Slyke, (1997), "e;Rosa Bonheur: The Artist's (Auto)Biography"e;, University of Michigan Press, 316 pages, ISBN 0472108255 (hardcover).

• Paul Elliott Russell, (1994), "e;The Gay 100"e;.

• Walter Shaw Sparrow, (1905), "e;Women painters of the world: from the time of Caterina Vigri, 1413-1463, to Rosa Bonheur and the present day"e;, London Hodder & Stoughton, 332 pages.

• T. Stanton, (editor), (1910), "e;Reminiscences of Rosa Bonheur"e;, New York: D. Appleton Co.

• R. M. Turner, (1991), "e;Portraits of women artists for children: Rosa Bonheur"e;, 32 pages, ISBN 0316856487/0316856533,SBU Library Teaching Practice Collection 759.4 BON.

• Gabriel P. Weisberg, (1998), "e;Rosa Bonheur: All Nature's Children"e;, Todd, 120 pages, ISBN 0965479315 (paperback).

Biography,work,bibliography.

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The Knitting Circle

First uploaded 1st. December, 1998.

Last altered 16th. March, 2000