Women of Modern France

by Hugo P. Thieme

The entire Bonheur family were artists, and all were moral and genuinely sympathetic. As a young girl, Rosa manifested an intense love for Nature, sunshine, and the woods; always independent in manners, she used to caricature her teachers; and while walking out into the country, she would draw, with charcoal or in sand, any objects that met her eye. Her father was not long in detecting her talent. She was wedded to her art from the very beginning, showing no taste for or interest in any other subject. As soon as her father gave permission to follow art as a profession, she devoted all her energy to advancing herself in what she felt to be her life's work. For four years the young girl could be seen every day at the Louvre, copying the great masters and receiving principally from them her ideas of coloring and harmony, while from her father she learned her technique. After she had mastered these two principles, she decided to specialize in pastoral nature.

From that time her whole life was given up to the study of Nature and animals. Not able to study those near by, she procured a fine Beauvais sheep, which served as her model for two years. From the very first her work showed accuracy, purity, and an intuitive perception of Nature, and these qualities soon placed her among the foremost artists of the time. Her struggle for reputation and glory was not a long and arduous one, for after 1845 her fame was established—she was then but twenty-three years old; and after 1849, having exhibited some thirty pictures, her reputation had become European.

In order to be able to study her models with greater ease and freedom from the annoyance and coarse incivilities of the workmen at the slaughter houses, farmyards, and markets that she was in the habit of visiting, she adopted the garb of man.

Her honors in life were many, though always unsought. The Empress Eugénie, while regent during the absence of Napoleon III., went in person to her château and put around her neck the ribbon of the decoration of the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor, then for the first time bestowed upon woman for merit other than bravery and charity. The Emperor Maximilian of Mexico conferred upon her the decoration of San Carlos; the King of Belgium created her a chevalier of his order, the first honor won by a woman; the King of Spain made her a Commander of the Royal Order of Isabella the Catholic; and President Carnot created her an Officer of the Legion of Honor.

With qualities such as she possessed, Rosa Bonheur could not fail to attain immortality. Her success was due in no small degree to the scientific instruction which she received when a mere child; having been taught, from the very first, how to paint directly from a model, she supplemented this training by a period of four years of copying great masters. In the latter period she studied Paul Potter's work rather slavishly, but was individual enough to combine only the best in him with the best in herself; this gave her an originality such as possibly no other animal painter ever possessed—-not even Landseer, who is said to be "stronger in telling the story than in the manner of telling it."

Rosa Bonheur was too independent and original to follow any particular school or master, for her only inspiration and guide were her models, always living near by and upon intimate terms with her. Thus, in all her paintings, we instinctively feel that she painted from conviction, from her own observation, nothing being added for mere artistic effect. To some extent her pictures impress one as a perfect French poem in which there is no superfluous word, in which no word could be changed without destroying the effect of the whole; thus, in her paintings there is not a superfluous brush stroke; everything is necessary to the telling of the story; but she excels the perfect poem, for, in French literature, it seldom has a message distinct from its technique, while her pictures breathe the very essence of sympathy, love, and life. We feel that she thoroughly knew her subjects as a connoisseur; but her animals do not impress one as the production of an artist who knew them as do horse traders and cattle dealers, who know their stock from the purely physical standpoint; the animals of this artist are from the brush of one who was familiar with their habits, who loved them, had lived with and studied them—who knew and appreciated their higher qualities. Rosa Bonheur most harmoniously united two essential elements in art—a scientific as well as sympathetic conception of her subject. Possibly this is the reason that her pictures appeal to animal lovers throughout the world.

As was stated, she was independent, hence kept aloof from the corruptions of contemporary French art and its technique lovers, always pursuing an even tenor in her art and never permitting one of her pictures to leave her studio in a crude or unfinished state. In all her long career she kept her original sketches, never parting with one, in spite of the most tempting offers; and this explains the fact that the work of her later years exhibits the freshness and other qualities of that of her youth. Thus, her art has gained by her experience, even though her best work was done between about 1848 and 1860, and is especially marked by its excellence in composition, the anatomy, the breadth of touch, the harmony of coloring, and the action, although it is said to lack the spontaneity, the originality, and the highly imaginative quality which are at their best in The Horse Fair; the same qualities seem to have been possessed by many of her contemporaries, such as Troyon.

Notwithstanding these apparent defects, Rosa Bonheur stands for something higher in art than do most of her contemporaries. She was not influenced by the skilled and often corrupt technicians; she perfected her technique by study of the old masters and learned her art from Nature; wisely keeping free from the ornamental, gorgeous, and highly imaginative and exaggerated historical Romantic school, in French art she stands out almost alone with Millet. Whatever may be said of the more virile and masculine art of other great animal painters, Rosa Bonheur, by her truthfulness, her science, her close association and intimate communion with her animal world, by the glad and healthy vigor which her paintings breathe, has taught the world the great lesson that there are intelligence, will, love, and even soul, in animals.