The latter, in very natural despair, allowed Rosa to stay at home, in the Rue des Tournelles, where he was newly established and where he had fitted up a studio. He even allowed the young girl free entry to the studio and gave her permission to sketch. She asked for nothing better. While her father scoured the city on his round of lessons, she would shut herself into the studio and work with desperate energy, taking in turn every object hanging on the walls for her models.
One day on returning home, at the end of his day’s work, Raymond Bonheur discovered on the easel a little canvas representing a bunch of cherries, a well drawn canvas and excellently painted from nature. This was Rosa Bonheur’s first painting; it bore witness to a genuine artistic temperament. Her father was delighted, but he hid his pleasure.
“That is not so bad,” he allowed to Rosa. “Work seriously, and you may become an artist.”
This word of encouragement set the young girl’s heart to pulsing with emotion. Then it needed only application and courage? She felt within her an energy that nothing could rebuff and an ambition that nothing could quench.
Rosa Bonheur had found her path.
[THE FIRST SUCCESSES]
Not long after this, a serious and determined young girl might be seen in the halls of the Louvre, copying with desperate energy the works of the great masters. She wore an eccentric costume, consisting of a sort of dolman with military frogs. It was young Rosa Bonheur serving her apprenticeship to art. The students and copyists who regularly frequented the museum, not knowing her name, had christened her “the little hussard.” But the jests and criticisms flung out by passing strangers in regard to her work, far from discouraging her, only drove her to still more obstinate and persistent study. The hours which she did not consecrate to the Louvre, she spent in her father’s studio, multiplying her sketches and anatomical studies. Even at this period she had already grasped instinctively the truth formulated by Ingres, that “honesty in art depends upon line-work.” Few painters have so far insisted upon this honesty, this conscientiousness, without which the most gifted artist remains incomplete. Whatever gifts he may be endowed with by nature, talent cannot be improvised; it is the fruit of independent and sustained toil. Later on, when she in her turn became a teacher, Rosa Bonheur was able to proclaim the necessity of line-work with all the more authority because it had always been the fundamental basis, the very scaffolding of all her works. “It is the true grammar of art,” she would affirm, “and the time thus spent cannot fail to be profitable in the future.”