1899-05-25

ROSA BONHEUR (nee Marie-Rosalie Bonheur) was a French artist  who died on this date (b:  1822); Bonheur was known best as a painter of animals (animalière). She also made sculpture in a realist style. Her paintings include Ploughing in the Nivernais, first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1848, and now in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, 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. Bonheur was widely considered to be the most famous female painter of the nineteenth century.

Bonheur was openly lesbian. She lived with her partner Nathalie Micas for over 40 years until Micas’s death, after which she began a relationship with American painter Anna Elizabeth Klumpke.

In a world where gender expression was (is?) policed, Bonheur broke boundaries by deciding to wear trousers, shirts and ties, although not in her painted portraits or posed photographs. 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; rather, she identified with the power and freedom reserved for men. Wearing men’s clothing, she argued, gave a sense of identity in that it allowed her to openly show that she refused to conform to societies’ construction of the gender binary. 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. Rosa Bonheur did all three. Bonheur never explicitly said she was a lesbian, but her lifestyle and the way she talked about her female partners suggests this.

Until 2013 women in France were forbidden from wearing trousers by the “Decree concerning the cross-dressing of women” which was implemented on November 17, 1800. 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.

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. She viewed men as stupid and mentioned that the only males she had time or attention for were the bulls she painted.
 
The Horse Fair (1853), considered by many to be her masterpiece, was acquired in 1887 by Cornelius Vanderbilt for a record sum and became one of her most widely reproduced works; Vanderbilt donated the piece to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Bonheur’s work sold so well that in 1860 she was able to purchase an estate with a château near Fontainebleau. In 1865 she was the first woman to be awarded the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour.
 
In the 1870s she began to study and sketch lions and to master the characteristics of their movement as she had horses and many other animals; as an aid to her observation and in appreciation of their spirit, she even raised some lions on her estate. In addition to animals,
 
Bonheur was intrigued by the legends of the American West. When “Buffalo Bill” Cody took his Wild West show to Paris in 1889, Bonheur befriended him and sketched his encampment and its denizens, as well as painting his portrait on horseback. Micas, Bonheur’s companion, died in 1889. That same year Bonheur 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 at their By chateau until Bonheur’s death.
 

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. She had her partners focus on the home life while she took on the role of breadwinner by focusing on her painting. Bonheur’s legacy paved the way for other lesbian artists who didn’t favour the life society had laid out for them.

Bonheur died on this date at the age of 77, at Thomery (By), France. She was buried together with Nathalie Micas (1824 – 24 June 1889), her lifelong companion, at Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris. Klumpke was Bonheur’s sole heir after her death, and later joined Micas and Bonheur in the same cemetery upon her death. Many of her paintings, which had not previously been shown publicly, were sold at auction in Paris in 1900.

The first biography of Bonheur was published during her lifetime: a pamphlet written by Eugène de Mirecourt, Les Contemporains: Rosa Bonheur, which appeared just after her Salon success with The Horse Fair in 1856. Bonheur later corrected and annotated this document.

The second account was written by Anna Klumpke, Bonheur’s companion in the last year of her life. Klumpke’s biography, published in 1909 as Rosa Bonheur: sa vie, son oeuvre, was translated in 1997 by Gretchen Van Slyke and published as Rosa Bonheur: The Artist’s (Auto)biography, so-named because Klumpke had used Bonheur’s first-person voice.