Rosa Bonheur

by François Crastre

One day a Prussian officer of high rank presented himself at her home in the name of Prince Karl-Frederick. The latter, who was a confirmed admirer of the artist, whom he had met in former years, sent her an order of safe-conduct which would place her and her belongings beyond the danger of any annoyance. Rosa Bonheur ran her eye over the paper and in the presence of the officer tore it into tiny pieces. Nobly and simply the great artist refused to accept any favours, feeling, in view of the existing painful circumstances, that it would be a shameful thing for her to do. A French woman before all else, she submitted in advance to all the abuses and exigencies of the conquerors. On another occasion, a German prince came to By, to pay his respects. She refused to receive him. We should add that the Prussians, whose excesses and brutalities were so frequent during that campaign, had the wisdom not to meddle with Rosa Bonheur.

After the treaty of peace was signed, she set herself eagerly to work once more. “I was occupied at that time,” she wrote, “in studying the big cats; I made sketches at the Jardin des Plantes, in the circuses, in the menageries, anywhere and everywhere that I could find lions and panthers.”

This is the epoch from which dates that admirable series of wild beasts in which Rosa Bonheur manifests a power of expression and virility of execution that she never before had occasion to display, and that seem absolutely incredible as coming from the brush of a woman. No other painter has rendered with greater truth and force the undulous and elastic movements of the panther or the tiger; Barye himself, in his admirable bronzes, has never endowed his lions with greater life or more majestic grandeur than Rosa Bonheur has done. The latter, with her astounding memory and with an eye as profound and luminous as a photographic lens, caught and retained the most fugitive expressions on the mobile physiognomy of the great cats. She noted them down with rapid and unfaltering pencil; the painting of the picture after this was a mere matter of execution. Is there any finer presentment of the tranquil beauty of a lion in repose than The Lion Meditating? Beneath the royal mane, his features have a haughty placidity and his eyes a serene intentness that are admirably rendered. The Lion Roaring is possibly even more beautiful, because of the difficulty which the artist had to overcome in catching the peculiarly rapid and mobile expression which accompanies the act of roaring. Under the effort of his tense muscles, the mane rises, bristling, around the powerful neck and above the straining head. There is nothing cruel in the physiognomy of this lion: his roaring is not the cry of the beast of prey scenting his victim, but the call of the desert king, saluting the rising orb of day or the descending night. The artist has admirably expressed this difference in a foreshortening of the head which Correggio or Veronese might have envied her.

PLATE VIII.—TRAMPLING THE GRAIN
(Rosa Bonheur Studio, at By)

This work, which was her last, is one of the most beautiful of all that Rosa Bonheur painted because of the intensity of the movement which sweeps the horses in a superb headlong rush, over the heaped-up grain which they trample under foot. This splendid canvas remains unfinished, death having overtaken the noble artist before the final touches had been added.

In all the animals that she painted,—and she painted nearly all the animals there are,—Rosa Bonheur succeeded in reproducing their separate characteristic expressions, “the amount of soul which nature has bestowed upon them.” M. Roger Milès, the excellent art critic, from whom we have frequently borrowed in the course of this biography, expresses it in the following admirable manner:

“Through the infinite study that she made of animals, Rosa Bonheur reached the conviction that their expression must be the interpretation of a soul, and since she understood the types and the species that her brush reproduced, she was able, through an instinct of extraordinary precision, to endow them, one and all, with precisely the glance and the psychic intensity that belongs to them. She takes the animals in the environment in which they live, in the setting with which their form harmonizes, in short, in the conditions that have played an essential part in their evolution, and she records with inflexible sincerity what nature places beneath her eyes and what her patient study has permitted her to understand. It is more especially for this reason, among many others, that the work of Rosa Bonheur deserves to live, and that the eminent artist stands to-day as one of the most finished animal painters with which the history of our national art is honoured.”