Rosa Bonheur Part 1

Rosa Bonheur.

by Fr. (Francois) Crastre.

CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH

In 1821, a young painter of brilliant promise was living in Bordeaux.

His name was Raymond Bonheur. But the fairies who presided at his birth omitted to endow him with riches, in addition to talent. The hardships of existence compelled him to relinquish his dreams of glory and to pursue the irksome task of earning his daily bread. The artist became a drawing master and went the rounds of private lessons. Among his pupils he made the acquaintance of a young girl, Mlle. Sophie Marquis, as penniless as himself, but attractive and gentle, full of courage, and displaying exceptional ability in music. A similarity of tastes and opinions drew these two artistic natures toward each other.

They fell in love, and the marriage service united their destinies.

The young couple started upon married life with no other fortune than their mutual attachment and equal courage. He continued to teach drawing and she gave lessons in music. But before long she was forced to put an end to these lessons in order to devote herself to new duties. Indeed, it was less than a year after their marriage, namely on the 16th of March, 1822, that a little girl was born into the world: this little girl was Rosalie Bonheur, better known under the name of Rosa Bonheur.

It is not surprising in such an artistic environment, that the child's taste should have undergone a sort of obscure, yet undoubted impregnation. From the time that she began to understand, she heard art and nothing else discussed around her; her first uncertain steps were taken in her father's studio, and her first playthings were a brush and a palette laden with colours.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE II.--THE a.s.s

(Rosa Bonheur Studio, at By)

Rosa Bonheur was inimitable in the art of seizing the expression on the face of an animal. Here, for instance, is a study of an a.s.s which makes quite a charming picture. Note the admirable rendering of the animal's att.i.tude, which is half obstinacy and half resignation, while the worn-out body weighs so heavily on the shrunken legs!]

Rosalie could hardly walk before she was drawing and painting everywhere. Later on, she gave a spirited account of this:

"I was not yet four years old when I conceived a veritable pa.s.sion for drawing, and I bespattered the white walls as high as I could reach with my shapeless daubs: another great source of amus.e.m.e.nt was to cut objects out of paper. They were always the same, however: I would begin by making long paper ribbons, then with my scissors, I would cut out, in the first place, a shepherd, and after him a dog, and next a cow, and next a ship, and next a tree, invariably in the same order. I have spent many a long day at this pastime."

The Bonheurs had, at this time, formed a close friendship with a family by the name of Silvela, but the latter left Bordeaux in 1828 in order to a.s.sume the direction of an inst.i.tute for boys in Paris. The separation did not break off their intercourse. They corresponded frequently and in every letter the Silvelas urged Raymond Bonheur to come and join them in Paris where, they said, he would find an easier and more remunerative way of employing his talent. These repeated appeals strongly tempted the man, but a journey to Paris, at this epoch, was not an easy matter. Besides, his family had increased to the extent of two more children: Auguste Bonheur, born in 1824, and Isidore Bonheur, born in 1827. At last, after much hesitation, he made up his mind to set forth alone to try his luck, prepared to return home if he did not succeed.

He went directly to the Silvelas' in the capacity of instructor of drawing; the families of some of the pupils took an interest in him and obtained him opportunities. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, the great naturalist, entrusted him with the execution of a large number of plates for a natural history. If not a fortune, this was at least an a.s.sured living. Accordingly, Bonheur decided to transfer his entire household to Paris.

They joined him in 1829 and were installed in the Rue Saint-Antoine.

Little Rosa, who was then seven years old, was no sooner settled in Paris, than she was placed together with her brothers in a boys'

school which happened to be located in the same house where the Bonheurs lived.

Being brought up with young boys of her own age, she acquired those boyish manners that she retained throughout life, and to which she owes, without the slightest doubt, that virile mark which was destined to characterize her painting. She used to go with her comrades, during recess, to play in the Place Royale. "I was the ring-leader in all the games and I did not hesitate, when necessary, to use my fists."

The revolution of 1830 ensued and Rosa witnessed it develop beneath the windows of her father's dwelling. These were evil hours and the Bonheur family suffered in consequence. Lessons became rarer and the pinch of poverty was felt within the household, which was forced to migrate again to No. 30 Rue des Tournelles, a large seventeenth century mansion, solemn and gloomy, of which Rosa must have retained the worst possible memories had it not chanced that it was here she acquired a little comrade, Mlle. Micas, who was destined to become, subsequently, her best friend.

The years which followed were equally unfortunate for Raymond Bonheur: Paris had hardly recovered from the shock of the Revolution, when in 1832 the cholera made its appearance. There was no further question of lessons, for everyone thought solely of his own safety; the rich fled from the city, the others remained closely housed in order to avoid the fatal contagion. To escape the scourge, Raymond Bonheur once more changed his dwelling and established himself in the Rue du Helder.

Variable and impulsive by nature, the painter delighted in change. He was barely installed in the Rue du Helder when he left the new abode in order to move to Menilmontant in the centre of a hotbed of Saint-Simonism, the doctrines of which he had enthusiastically espoused. In 1833, we find him installed on the Quai des ecoles. This year a great misfortune befell the family: Mme. Bonheur died and the painter found himself alone and burdened with the responsibility of feeding, tending, and bringing up four children, one of whom, Isabelle Bonheur, born in 1830, was only three years old.

It was at this time that Raymond Bonheur became anxious to have Rosa, who was now eleven years of age, acquire some vocation. Inasmuch as she had shown the most violent aversion to study in every school she had attended, her father fancied that perhaps business would be more to her taste. Accordingly he apprenticed her to a dressmaker. But the young girl showed no more inclination for sewing than for arithmetic and grammar. At the end of two weeks it became necessary to give up the experiment.

Raymond Bonheur, who was absent all day long giving lessons, was absolutely bent upon finding some occupation for Rosa. He made one last attempt to send her to school; so he placed her with Mme. Gibert in the Rue de Reuilly. Rosa with her boyish manners and her incorrigible turbulence brought revolution into the peaceful precincts of the pension. She engaged her new comrades in games of mimic warfare, combats, cavalry charges across the flower-beds of the garden which was reduced to ruins before the end of the second day. The princ.i.p.al in consternation returned the irrepressible amazon to her father.

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 pa.s.sing 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."

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE III.--THE HORSE FAIR

(National Gallery, London)

This painting is considered by some critics to be Rosa Bonheur's masterpiece. There is no other painting of hers in which she attained the same degree of power, or the same degree of truth in individual expression. What naturalness, and what vigour in this drove of prancing horses, and what movement of those haunches straining under the effort of the muscles!]

During this period of study, she was living in the Rue de la Bienfaisance; her father's mania for changing his residence dragged her successively to the Rue du Roule, and then to the Rue Rumford, in the level stretch of the Monceau quarter, where Raymond Bonheur, who had just remarried, installed his new household.

At that time the Rue Rumford was practically in the open country. On all sides there were farms abundantly stocked with cows, sheep, pigs, and poultry. This was an unforeseen piece of good fortune for young Rosa, and she felt her pa.s.sionate love for animals reawaken. Equipped with her pencils, she installed herself at a farm at Villiers, near to the park of Neuilly, and there she would spend the entire day, striving to catch and record the different att.i.tudes of her favourite models. For the sake of greater accuracy, she made a study of the anatomy of animals, and even did some work in dissection. Not content with this, she applied herself to sculpture, and made models of the animals in clay or wax before drawing them. This is how she came to acquire her clever talent for sculpture which would have sufficed to establish a reputation if she had not become the admirable painter that we know her to have been.

Her special path was now determined: she would be a painter of animals. She understood them, she knew them, and loved them. But it did not satisfy her to study them out-of-doors; she wanted them in her own home. She persuaded her father to admit a sheep into the apartment; then, little by little, the menagerie was increased by a goat, a dog, a squirrel, some caged birds, and a number of quails that roamed at liberty about her room.

At last, in 1841, after years of devoted toil, Rosa ventured to offer to the Salon a little painting representing _Two Rabbits_ and a drawing depicting some _Dogs and Sheep_. Both the drawing and the painting were accepted. It was an occasion of great rejoicing both for Rosa Bonheur and for her father. The young artist was at this time only nineteen years of age.

From this time forward, she sent pictures to the Salon annually.

During the first years her exhibits pa.s.sed unnoticed; but little by little her sincerity and the vigour of her talent made an impression upon the critics. The latter were soon forced to admire the intense relief of her method of painting, living animals transcribed in full action, and their different physiognomies rendered with admirable fidelity and art. But what labour it cost to arrive at this degree of perfection! Every morning, the young artist made the rounds of slaughter-houses, markets, the Museum, anywhere and everywhere that she might see and study animals. And this was destined to continue throughout her entire life.

In 1842 she sent three paintings to the Salon: namely, an _Evening Effect in a Pasture_, a _Cow lying in a Pasture_, and a _Horse for Sale_; and in addition to these, a terra-cotta, the _Shorn Sheep_, which received the approval of the critics. And no less praise was bestowed upon her paintings, which showed a talent for landscape fully equal to her mastery of animal portraiture.

Her success was progressive. Her pictures in the Salon of 1843 sold to advantage and Rosa Bonheur was able to travel. She brought home from her trip five works that found a place in the Salon of 1845. The following year her exhibits produced a sensation. Anatole de la Forge devoted an enthusiastic article to her, and the jury awarded her a third-cla.s.s medal.

"In 1845," Rosa Bonheur herself relates, "the recipients had to go in person to obtain their medals at the director's office. I went, armed with all the courage of my twenty-three years. The director of fine-arts complimented me and presented the medal in the name of the king. Imagine his stupefaction when I replied: 'I beg of you, Monsieur, to thank the king on my behalf, and be so kind as to add that I shall try to do better another time.'"

Rosa Bonheur kept her word: her whole life was a long and sustained effort to "do better." After the Salon of 1846, where she was represented by five remarkable exhibits, she paid a visit to Auvergne, where she was able to study a breed of cattle very different from any that she had hitherto seen and painted: superb animals of ma.s.sive build, with compact bodies, short and powerful legs, and wide-spread nostrils. The sheep and horses also had a characteristic physiognomy that was strongly marked and noted with scrupulous care, and enabled her to reappear in the Salon of 1847 with new types that gathered crowds around her canvases, to stare in wonderment at these animals which were so obviously different from those which academic convention was in the habit of showing them.

The general public admired, and so did the critics. It was only the jury that remained hostile towards this independent and personal manner of painting, which ignored the established procedure of the schools and based itself wholly upon inspiration and sincerity; accordingly, they always took pains to place her pictures in obscure corners or at inaccessible heights. The public, however, which always finds its way to what it likes, took pains on its part to discover and enjoy them.

In 1848 Rosa Bonheur had her revenge. The recently proclaimed Republic, wishing to show its generosity towards artists, decreed that all works offered that year to the Salon should without exception be received. As to the awards, they were to be determined by a jury from which the official and administrative element was to be henceforth banished. The judges were Leon Cogniet, Ingres, Delacroix, Horace Vernet, Decamps, Robert-Fleury, Ary Scheffer, Meissonier, Corot, Paul Delaroche, Jules Dupre, Isabey, Drolling, Flandrin, and Roqueplan.

Rosa Bonheur exhibited six paintings and two pieces of sculpture. The paintings comprised: _Oxen and Bulls_ (Cantal Breed), _Sheep in a Pasture_, _Salers Oxen Grazing_, a _Running Dog_ (Vendee breed), _The Miller Walking_, _An Ox_. The two bronzes represented a _Bull_ and a _Sheep_.

Her success was complete. Judged by her peers, in the absence of academic prejudice, she obtained a medal of the first cla.s.s.

This year an event took place in her domestic life. As a result of recent remarriage, her father had a son, Germain Bonheur. The house had become too small for the now enlarged family; besides, the crying of the child, and the constant coming and going necessitated by the care that it required seriously interfered with Rosa's work.

Accordingly she left her home in the Rue Rumford and took a studio in the Rue de l'Ouest. She was accompanied by Mlle. Micas, the old-time friend of her childhood, whom she had rediscovered, and who from this time forth attached herself to Rosa with a devotion surpa.s.sing that of a sister, and almost like that of a mother. She also was an artist and took a studio adjoining that of her friend; several times she collaborated on Rosa's canvases, when the latter was over-burdened with work. After Rosa had sketched her landscape and blocked in her animals, Mlle. Micas would carry the work forward, and Rosa, coming after her, would add the finishing touch of her vigorous and unfaltering brush. But to Rosa Bonheur Mlle. Micas meant far more as a friend than as a collaborator. With a devoted and touching tenderness she watched over the material welfare of the great artist, who was by nature quite indifferent to the material things of life. It was the good and faithful Nathalie who supervised Rosa's meals and repaired her garments. She was also a good counsellor, and on many different occasions Rosa Bonheur paid tribute to the intelligence and devotion of her friend.