Bonheur, Rosa
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
bo-ner or bo-nur, Rosa (1822-1899), a distinguished French artist. She inherited her talent and received instruction from her father, an artist of Bordeaux. From the first, pictures of animals were her forte. Goats and Sheep, and Two Rabbits were the first to attract attention. In 1855 the Haymaking Season in Auvergne was shown at the Universal Exposition in Paris, and The Horse Fair was exhibited in London. The latter is the picture by which Miss Bonheur is known in America. She was anxious that it should be owned by her native city and offered it to Bordeaux for $6,000. She afterward sold it in London for $20,000, and subsequently it was bought by Cornelius Vanderbilt for the Metropolitan Gallery of New York . Rosa Bonheur was a woman of fine appearance. She is said to have gone about fairs and markets dressed in a man's clothes to escape observation. This was one way she had of studying horses at first hand. In 1892 she sold a picture of Horses Threshing Corn for $60,000. Ten horses are shown in life size, making the largest animal picture ever painted. Her admirers were naturally enough sporting characters, but there can be no doubt of her genius in this kind of art. "No jockey knew a horse better than she." Her study was at Fontainebleau, France. During the siege of Paris, 1870-1, strict orders were issued to the German soldiery not to molest the home of Rosa Bonheur. See Millet ; Millais ; Corot Bonhomme Richard. See Jones ; John Paul
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 account already treats Bonheur as a genius of animal painting, and the biography it gives still holds: The Horse Fair passed from London to Cornelius Vanderbilt, who gave it to the Metropolitan Museum in 1887, where it hangs today. What changed was her standing. Through the mid-twentieth century her huge, minutely finished animal canvases fell out of critical favour as modernism took hold, and the prices of the 1892 sort quoted here were not seen again; from the 1970s feminist art history brought her back, and her studio-home at By near Fontainebleau is now a museum, with a bicentenary retrospective marking her birth in 2022. Two things the 1910 entry passes over lightly are now central to how she is discussed: the trousers were worn under a formal police permit, needed to work in slaughterhouses and horse markets, and she lived for decades with Nathalie Micas and then with the painter Anna Klumpke, who wrote the first biography. The Paris ordinance behind that permit was not formally struck from the books until 2013.
Written for this edition, 2026.