Broad Strokes, page 6
So a singular moment in time is the secret of Villers’s marvelous, moving painting: two young women longing to make art found themselves in a brief period of opportunity, when instruction, exhibition, and even fame were possible.
And in that moment, perfection happened. A Fucking Excellent Day. Longing and kinship and ability became great art. A masterpiece.
CHAPTER 5:
ROSA BONHEUR
Mlle. Rosa paints almost like a man.
—THÉOPHILE THORÉ-BÜRGER
The fact is, in the way of males, I only like the bulls I paint.
—ROSA BONHEUR
IN THE SUMMER OF 1889, Rosa Bonheur—mourning the recent death of her spouse—sought distraction in the Paris World’s Fair. Like le Tout-Paris, she took in the architectural debut of the Fair’s succès de scandale—the Eiffel Tower—and then, if later depictions can be believed, she dragged her shrouded black visage to the encampment of that great nineteenth-century American entertainer, Buffalo Bill Cody. A riveting spectacle of shooting, roping, and cowboy versus Indian “battles,” Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show was just the thing to perk a person up. And Bonheur, who’d long had a thing for America, and an even longer thing for horses, was more susceptible than most.
Many remarkable artists visited the Wild West show in the seven months it camped in Paris, including such vanguards of Modernism as Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch, and James McNeill Whistler. But it was Bonheur, animal painter of a passing era, who got Buffalo Bill’s attention.
They shared a spirit. Cody: frontiersman, tracker, Pony Express rider, Army scout during the Indian Wars, buffalo hunter. Bonheur: painter, horsewoman, avid hunter, lover of women, wearer of pants.
A telling American lithograph—featuring a long-dead Napoleon (bucktoothed and slouching like a sack of potatoes atop his horse), Buffalo Bill (strapping and handsome astride his), and Bonheur (staring at Bill while painting)—captures the feel of their first meeting; a banner beneath the artist reads: Art Perpetuating Fame—Rosa Bonheur painting Buffalo Bill—Paris 1889.
Rosa Bonheur. Portrait of “Buffalo Bill” Cody. 1889.
Shortly after their meeting, Cody granted Bonheur total access to his Paris encampment. Bonheur made good use of her time there, completing some seventeen paintings, including a portrait of Buffalo Bill on his favorite horse.
It’s a straightforward picture of a man on horseback, but Bonheur tips her hand as an artist primarily interested in animals. While Cody glances to one side, maybe enacting the tracker he once was, his white horse meets our gaze.
Bonheur’s equestrian portrait of Buffalo Bill became an American icon. Cody had the painting shipped straight away to his wife. Years later, when he learned that his Nebraska home was in flames, he wired her: “Save the Rosa Bonheur and let the flames take the rest!”
Buffalo Bill was a metaphor for all that America stood for; it’s no surprise Bonheur was drawn to the man. Bonheur thought of herself as a forward-thinking woman in the American vein. “If America marches at the forefront of modern civilization,” she said, “it is because of their admirably intelligent manner of bringing up their daughters and the respect they have for their women.” For its part, America always liked Bonheur back. America’s little girls played with Rosa Bonheur dolls then the way, a hundred years later, they would covet those that looked like Shirley Temple.
Stepping through the front doors of the Metropolitan Museum of Art into the grandeur of the Great Hall, the first thing I looked for was Bonheur’s The Horse Fair (see next spread). I was a twenty-something small-town girl in Manhattan, and that painting, hanging high above, reminded me of where I’d started, Montana, where we kept horses in the small corral behind our house. The art I’d grown up with—Russell, Remington, Curtis—was filled with horses, shorthand for a disappearing way of life.
Bonheur’s roiling horseflesh was very different from the rangy mustangs and Appaloosas I’d grown up with, on canvas or in fact. Her muscular Percherons, native to France, were as fleshy and erotic as any Rubens or Renoir in the galleries upstairs. But still, they felt familiar. Passing beneath them was a kind of blessing. They helped me believe I might belong there.
I was hardly the first to fall under The Horse Fair’s dramatic spell. Bonheur’s enormous canvas—more than 8 x 16 ft/244 x 488 cm—was one of the most beloved paintings of the entire nineteenth century. First exhibited at the Salon of 1853, The Horse Fair won instant popular and critical acclaim, and made thirty-one-year-old Rosa Bonheur an international celebrity.
The finished painting was a cannonball lobbed at the highest echelon of art. Roiling curves of strength and splendor, the buttocks, bellies, and necks of Bonheur’s muscular Percherons provide a rhythm of curves across the massive canvas. This French breed—beloved of the emperor—is here lord of horses, lunging across ground churned to dust under heavy hooves. Punctuating the rhythm of the enormous mounts are the white and blue smocks of their more diminutive handlers. Bonheur’s horses rear this way and that, displaying her anatomical skill. The fact that they are oversize in relation to the humans among them can be no accident.
It’s something of a convention in Western art to depict a heroic-size (i.e., bigger than life) rider on a life-size mount. This emphasizes the mastery of man, since it’s too easy for a spindly, near-hairless human to be upstaged by a big ol’ muscled horse. See the Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius for an obvious example of extra-human proportion. (Note that Aurelius is so supremely badass, he doesn’t even need shoes.)
Bonheur’s grooms, on the other hand, are smaller than they should be in relation to the horses, and their mustachioed faces are turned away or tucked in shadow. All but one. Right there near the center of the canvas, smooth-faced, head tilted in the same sidelong gesture as the rearing white horse nearby. Art historian James M. Saslow contends that this “man” isn’t one. Because this is the only groom without facial hair and the only figure to lock eyes with us as viewers—always a knowing gesture on the part of a subject—Saslow convincingly argues that it is the artist herself who meets our gaze. It seems Bonheur has created a secret self-portrait, saying, in effect, This is who I am. A bit masculine, in total control, and in the white-hot center of things.
The Horse Fair was the rare Salon painting admired by artists, critics, and the public alike. Delacroix—undisputed king of Romantic painting—wrote approvingly of it in his journal, and even the emperor and empress cooed over it. The emperor did not, however, approve the ample size (and audacious display of flesh) of Realist artist Gustave Courbet’s Nude Bather at the same Salon. He gave Courbet’s canvas an irritated slap with his riding crop, while the empress slyly inquired, “Is that a Percheron, too?”
She was poking fun at the monumental curves of Courbet’s nude, but it’s true that Bonheur’s horses are pretty sexy. And just as girls of a certain age love horses, so do royal women. When The Horse Fair traveled to England, Queen Victoria commanded a private viewing. And when Empress Eugenie briefly served as regent in the emperor’s absence, she bestowed the Cross of the Legion of Honor on Bonheur, who became the first woman ever to receive the illustrious medal. The award, said Empress Eugenie, proved that “genius has no sex.”
Rosa Bonheur. The Horse Fair. 1852–1855.
In America, reproductions could be found throughout the country, from post offices to schoolhouses to Elks lodges. The original ended up in the United States after it was purchased by one of the richest men in American history, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and gifted to the Met. Its landing in a foreign museum troubled its French author not at all. She’d offered it to her birthplace of Bordeaux at a reduced price, but the town fathers had passed. Tant pis.
Bonheur was once among the most celebrated artists in the world, but her art—big and muscular and naturalistic—was not where French art was headed: to Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, Pointillism, Fauvism, and the like. She, like many other once-great Academic painters of the nineteenth century, became something of an art historical footnote. They’d bet on the wrong horse, so to speak.
Her fame could not have been more unlikely. Bonheur came of age in the dark years for women artists after Napoleon, and was born in the hinterlands of Bordeaux. Her father, a not-very-successful painter named Raimond Bonheur, married one of his pupils, Sophie, and they produced four children. The marriage certificate lists Raimond’s occupation as “history painter,” that high-flown style well on the wane in Paris.
When Rosa, the eldest, was just six, Raimond left his young family for the capital of art. He meant to send for them when he found work. After a year they came anyway.
Raimond hadn’t done much art in his year away. Instead, he’d fallen feverishly in love with Saint-Simonianism, a utopian quasi-religion with a radical social agenda preaching, among other things, total equality between the sexes. Which should have been great for Sophie, who was raising four young children without a hint of help. Reality was, of course, otherwise. “My father was a born apostle,” Bonheur wryly told her biographer. “He loved us impulsively, but his first priority was social reform. He never sacrificed noble ideals to personal matters.” Though Saint-Simonianism never aided Sophie, her eldest child embraced its spiritual impulse and its creed of gender equality.
When at age eleven Bonheur lay near death with scarlet fever, her mother nursed her tirelessly. Unlike many children in the neighborhood, Bonheur survived. But soon after Sophie herself fell ill and died, likely from exhaustion. Bonheur never forgot her mother’s punishing existence, claiming that’s why she never married (by which she meant become the wife of a man). But she believed Sophie was always with her, a guardian angel guiding and gifting her life.
Belief in her mother’s divine intervention was likely one source of Bonheur’s unwavering self-confidence. Art and animals and women were the entwined passions of her life; no social conventions impeded their pursuit.
Art. Raimond’s four children with Sophie all became artists. The Bonheurs became so renowned that Francis Galton (a cousin of Darwin) wrote an 1869 essay called “Hereditary Genius” that touted the Bonheurs as living examples.
Rosa had started them off. After she was kicked out of even progressive co-ed schools, and bullishly resisted being apprenticed to a seamstress, Raimond resigned himself to becoming her teacher. He sent her to the Louvre for long days of sketching alone from the Masters, and corrected her drawings at night.
Animals. Always resistant to traditional education, Bonheur learned to read as a child only after her mother created an alphabet of animals to spark her interest. When she was a teenager, her father allowed a menagerie in their Paris apartment that included “rabbits, chickens, ducks, quails, canaries, finches, and a goat” that needed to be carried down six flights of stairs to the street for an occasional airing. “Couldn’t I become famous,” Bonheur once asked, “by just painting animals?”
She could, Raimond assured her. And with Saint-Simonian fervor, he declared, “Maybe, daughter, I’ll fulfill my ambitions through you!” Icky or awesome, it was a vote of confidence in a young female artist just starting out.
Women. When Bonheur was fourteen, she caught sight of her father painting the portrait of a younger girl in his studio. I imagine Bonheur, stocky and normally self-assured, peeking from behind a curtain at a sickly Nathalie Micas, prostrate on a chaise longue. Nathalie’s parents feared their daughter might not live much longer, so had asked Raimond for a painted memento.
Behind the curtain, Bonheur held her breath. She recognized Nathalie from a dream. At once she believed her mother had sent the younger girl to her. It was love at first sight. Bonheur became her protector, while Nathalie looked after her motherless friend. When Bonheur was old enough to rent her own studio, Nathalie visited every day. Their bond was so obvious that on his deathbed Nathalie’s father had the girls kneel before him, then consecrated them to each other for life. It was a marriage in everything but legal papers.
Nathalie did not die young. She remained steadfast at Bonheur’s side for more than fifty years.
Rosa Bonheur. Ploughing in the Nivernais. 1849.
Their unconventional marriage came just a year before Bonheur’s first great public success, Ploughing in the Nivernais, unveiled at the Salon of 1849. On a clear fall day, a dozen Charolais oxen (native to Nivernais) yoked in pairs plow the soil in preparation for winter. Rich, turned-over earth fills the foreground while muscled animals march the middle. They are the heroes of the scene. The farmers and drivers with them are mostly tucked beneath wide-brimmed hats or behind the oxen’s majestic bulk.
Bonheur more than ennobles the beautiful creatures doing God’s work under a clear autumn sky. She loves them. Adores their fleshy ox bodies and big bovine heads. She makes us love them, too.
Though raised on a dairy farm, I never saw the worthiness of cows until standing before Bonheur’s painting at the Musée d’Orsay one rainy November in Paris. I sensed the steam rising from those sweaty flanks, smelled their earthy, pungent scent. These were noble creatures of admirable will and intelligence. PETA could only hope for a propagandist today as convincing as Bonheur.
It’s often noted that humans mostly take second place to animals in Bonheur’s work. Ruskin (remember him?), who dined with Bonheur once, later disparaged this tendency in her: “No painter of animals ever yet was entirely great who shrank from painting the human face, and Mlle. Bonheur clearly does shrink from it.”
For her part, Bonheur was unimpressed with the eminent critic. “He is a gentleman,” she conceded after their dinner, “an educated gentleman, but he is a theorist. He sees nature with a small eye, just like a bird.” Bonheur knew animals. And she knew art from the position of the painter, not the theorist. She was no birdbrain.
Bonheur was fond of characterizing people as animals, including herself. In letters and other writing she variously refers to herself as a dog, a calf, an owl, a donkey, a boar, a tortoise, a bear, and no doubt more. But the animal she felt most kinship with was the ox or bull.
So is it any surprise that the heroic center of Ploughing in the Nivernais is no farm boy, but a great white ox who seems to have caught sight of us from the other side of the picture plane? There’s beautiful intelligence, and personality, in those bovine eyes.
What is a painter, or any artist, if not one who sees?
It seems to me that Ploughing in the Nivernais is, again at least in part, a self-portrait.
When Édouard Louis Dubufe painted Bonheur in 1857, she didn’t like his depicting her leaning on a “boring table.” With Dubufe’s permission, Bonheur herself painted in a lovely brown bull cuddled at her side instead, her painting hand draped over its broad, hairy neck. And while Dubufe’s Bonheur stares a little vacuously into the distance (shades of fashion models to come), Bonheur’s bull engages us with frank intelligence.
An odd couple at first glance, Bonheur with her bull would be familiar to anyone raised in Catholic France from depictions of the four Evangelists. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John each have a corresponding symbol: man, lion, ox, and eagle, respectively. As authors of the Gospels, the Evangelists are usually depicted with a book, a writing instrument, and their symbol nearby. Note that Saint Luke is represented by the ox. Saint Luke is also the patron saint of artists.
Édouard Louis Dubufe. Portrait of Rosa Bonheur. 1857.
Perhaps such saintly connotations offered a counter-narrative to Bonheur’s many public “unorthodox” habits. The smoking, the cropped hair, the wearing of pants—all taboos for women, some illegal.
Bonheur’s excuses always sounded valid enough: She wore her hair short because, after her mother died, “who was going to take care of my curls . . . ?” Perhaps true at age eleven, but she was still wearing short hair when she died six decades later.
As for her preferred attire, according to Bonheur, only by dressing as a man could she move among the rough throngs at slaughterhouses and the horse fair “unmolested.” In other words, office casual was essential to her art.
By 1850, Bonheur had received a Permission de Travestissement—cross-dressing permit—from the police. Cross-dressing (a.k.a. wearing pants) was illegal, so to evade arrest, Bonheur needed the official document. It allowed her to wear men’s clothing in public, with certain restrictions against male attire at “spectacles, balls or other public meeting places.” The permit was renewable every six months and required the signature of her doctor.
With money from The Horse Fair and other sales (Nathalie was an excellent businesswoman), Bonheur, Nathalie, and Nathalie’s mother, Madame Micas, left Paris for the village of By, near the forest of Fontainebleau, in 1860. There, they purchased a château Bonheur christened the “Domain of Perfect Affection.” They lived surrounded by a vast menagerie that included monkeys, lions, horses, hounds, farm animals by the dozens, and three wild mustangs sent by an American admirer.
When Nathalie’s mother died in 1875, things went on much as they always had. Rosa and Nathalie were the original Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, a woman artist and her helpmeet living life (and loving each other) on their own terms in the French countryside. Nathalie managed the house and menagerie, while Bonheur painted and hunted in Fontainebleau’s famous woods, thanks to special dispensation from the emperor.
When Nathalie died in the spring of 1889, Bonheur was bereft. “You can very well understand how hard it is to be separated from a friend like my Nathalie, whom I loved more and more as we advanced in life,” she wrote to a friend. “She alone knew me.”
According to art historian and biographer Dore Ashton, with Nathalie gone, Bonheur “found life almost unendurable.”
