Rosa Bonheur

(France, 16/03/1822 - 25/05/1899)

The Horse Fair (1852-55)

Financially independent, living openly as a lesbian and open about her relationships with women, wearing men’s clothes and creating artworks of lowly subjects at a scale hitherto unseen, Rosa Bonheur was radical in every facet of her life, except that of her painterly style.

After being taught to paint by her father in her native Bordeaux, Bonheur’s first major success was making her Paris Salon debut in 1841 at just nineteen years old, followed by The Horse Fair (1855) which was requested for private viewing by Queen Victoria and became one of the first artworks to be widely reproduced in print.

Depicting what academies deemed a lowly subject matter in a style generally reserved for glorified history paintings, Bonheur amplified the importance of animals by executing the scene on the scale of Neoclassicism. So committed was she to her work that she not only observed livestock, but she dissected carcasses and visited slaughterhouses, allowing her to more accurately study their anatomy.

Becoming the first woman to receive the French Legion of Honor in 1865, Bonheur was branded as an exception to the nineteenth-century patriarchal belief that women couldn’t make great art and is a rarity among women artists, having had her talent recognised during her lifetime. This, along with her radical life, led to her work being treated with indifference and the ‘legend of Rosa Bonheur’ overshadowing her success.

Image: Rosa Bonheur, The Horse Fair (1852-55). Oil on canvas, 244.5 x 506.7 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, U.S.A.