Marlene Wagman-Geller

Dec 25, 2024 by Marlene Wagman-Geller

 

“Art is a tyrant. It demands heart, brain, soul, body…I wed art.” 

–Rosa Bonheur

 

Château de Rosa Bonheur (opened 2017)

Thomery, France

 

 

As she lay dying, Queen Victoria whispered for Turi, her Pomeranian, to be brought to her bed. Another nineteenth century woman who worshipped animals was a French painter. To view her canvasses, to learn about a road less travelled, proceed to the Château Musée Rosa Bonheur.

                

The fictional Dr. Doolittle could talk to the animals, a trait shared by Marie Rosalie (Rosa) born in 1822, in Bordeaux to Sophie and the portrait painter, Raimond Bonheur. In pursuit of commissions, Raimond moved his family to Paris in 1829 where the family frequently changed addresses to evade creditors. Rosa recalled, “In my early years, we used to migrate with the birds.” For a period, Raimond found steady employment with Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, the founder of the Jardin de Plantes Zoo, who hired him as an illustrator. A fringe benefit for Rosa was she could roam the zoo’s grounds.

                

A dreamer and idealist, Raimond, despite his Jewish religion, fell under the influence of the Christian, utopian socialist Saint-Simon sect that promised planetary harmony. A tenet of their philosophy was gender equality, and as such, they created a pants-dress for women. Her grandfather referred to Rosa’s odd manner of dressing as, “A boy in petticoats.” The cult initiated Rosa in a bizarre nocturnal ceremony that involved cloaks and candles. Raimond’s enthrallment of the Saint-Simon sect was apparent with his pronouncement of its leader,  “I believe in you as I believe in the sun.” Earning a living fell mainly on Sophie’s shoulders who gave piano lessons and took in sewing. Tragedy intruded when the eleven-year-old Rosa lost her mother; Raimond buried his wife in a pauper’s grave. Of Sophie’s premature death, Rosa wrote, “My mother, the most noble and proud of creatures, succumbing to exhaustion and wretched poverty, while my father was dreaming about saving the human race.”

                

When Rosa was nineteen, she shared a small Paris home with her father and siblings: Isidore, Auguste, and Juliette, as well as her menagerie of a squirrel named Kiko, rabbits, assorted birds, and butterflies. On the terrace, she kept a sheep, and when it appeared lonely, a billy goat joined the household. Rosa brought the sheep and billy goat down five flights of steps to graze in the nearby Plaine Moneau Park. Raimond gave his daughter drawing lessons, as the art academies did not admit female students. As a teen, Rosa occupied herself by copying paintings at the Louvre, mainly of Dutch masters. She filled her sketchpad with images of photographic precision. A firm believer that animals had souls, she portrayed them staring at the viewer, eyes radiating emotion. Male art students mocked her as “the little hussar.”

                

At age nineteen, Rosa held her first exhibit at the Paris Salon where she displayed Rabbits Nibbling Carrots. Although her work failed to elicit attention, by 1845, her canvasses were flying off her easel, and she won a third-place medal. The following year her painting, Sheep, prompted the critic Théophile Thoré to write, “Mlle Rosa Bonheur’s flock of sheep makes one want to be a shepherd, with a crook, a silk waistcoat and ribbons.” He ended with the era’s ultimate compliment, “She paints like a man.” Rosa also began dressing like a man. To study animal anatomy in the all-male domain of slaughterhouses, Rosa circumvented an 1800 law that made it illegal for women to don men’s attire. The Paris police granted her a “permission de travertissement” allowing her to wear pants in public. Unwilling to be molded by social mores, Rosa refused to ride sidesaddle, cut her hair short, told bawdy jokes, and indulged in after-dinner Havana cigars though smoking was associated with prostitution. During a performance at Opéra Comique, Rosa attended clad in her trademark blue painter’s smock. The lady also preferred ladies. As she expressed her preference, “As far as males go, I only like the bulls I paint.” The Napoleonic Code of 1804 refrained from punishing acts of private female sexuality. 

                

A turning point in Rosa’s career occurred in 1848 when she received a gold medal from judges Delacroix and Ingres, followed by a 3,000-franc commission for her canvass, Ploughing in the Nivernais, that displayed two teams of oxen pulling heavy plows. Paul Cézanne commented, “It is horribly like the real thing.” Another critic observed the painting showed “much more vigor…than you normally find in the hand of a woman.” She used part of the proceeds to cover the cost of her father’s funeral. By 1951, using inspiration from the equine engravings on the Parthenon frieze, Rosa completed her largest and most famous work, Marché aux chevaux de Paris-The Horse Fair. The eight-foot canvass depicts the Paris horse market as a battle scene enacted on the tree—lined Boulevard de l’Hôpital. When the canvas had a British showing, Queen Victoria received a private viewing and the art critic, John Ruskin, suggested the French woman use watercolors and add some purple. The New York Times wrote, “She has taken London by storm by her skill and happy talent.” Nevertheless, the Bordeaux Museum refused to purchase the canvass, and Cornelius Vanderbilt II acquired it in an 1887 auction for $53,000 - $1.6 million in contemporary currency. The Gilded Age millionaire bequeathed the painting to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Occasionally, Rosa painted people, most notably Wild West legend Buffalo Bill, (in Paris for the 1889 Universal Exposition), as he posed on his horse in buckskin jacket.

                

Chateau de Rosa Bonheur: In 1859, the girl who had suffered from a nomadic youth purchased the Château de By, a three-story, seventeenth century manor house built on the remains of a 1413 manor house. The estate is located at the outskirts of a forest, close to the Château de Fontainebleau that served as the summer hunting lodge for eight centuries of French kings. Rosa declared her home, “the domain of Perfect Affection.” A staggering statistic is the keys to the Château weigh almost eleven pounds. The home and garden became the stomping grounds of Margot the mule, Jaques the stag, Roland the horse, Rastata the monkey, and Wasp the Cairn terrier. To feed Nero, the lion, servants pushed twenty pounds of raw beef through the bars of its cage. He eventually proved so unmanageable that Rosa sent him to the Jardin des Plantes; years later, when she visited he responded to her call. Other pets were a Bengal tiger, three panthers, polar bears. On a trip to the Pyrénées, Rosa returned with a pet otter that escaped its enclosure and found its way into her bed. A visitor to Rosa’s far from humble home was the Empress Eugénie, (the wife of Napoleon III), who pinned on her chest the Legion d’Honneur, making her the first woman to receive the medal. On the occasion, the empress remarked, “Genius has no sex.” Another royal guest was Queen Isabella of Spain. Imperial accolades arrived from Emperor Maximilian of Mexico and King Alfonso XII of Spain. Czar Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra of Russia met Rosa at the Louvre. The British author George Eliot, after viewing the Spanish Muleteers Crossing the Pyrenees, remarked, “What power! This is the way women should assert their rights.” A German manufacturer marketed a porcelain doll with the artist’s image for Christmas gifts. Not all were in Camp Rosa; her detractors referred to her as “that Jewess,” a barometer of the milieu’s anti-Semitism. She filled her estate with sheep, monkeys, dogs, birds, horses. She also shared the chateau with Nathalie Micas, who she had known since age fourteen, and, for a time, her lover’s liberal mother. Of her companion Rosa declared, “Had I been a man, I would have married her. I would have had a family, with my children as heirs, and nobody would have had any right to complain.” After living ogetherr for forty years, Nathalie passed away. The next occupant was the American painter Anna Klumpke who Rosa referred to as “my wife.”

                

Despite the estate’s grandeur, it retains a homey feel from touches such as a paint-dappled blue smock that rests on an upholstered chair, alongside brown leather lace-up boots and umbrella. A carved oak case holds Rosa’s tools of her trade: paint tubes, palettes, and paintbrushes. Next to the easel sprawls the golden skin of Fatma, Rosa’s pet lioness. In a nod to kitsch, a puppet is clothed in Rosa’s military-style black jacket that displays her Legion d’Honneur cross. One can view the buckskins, a gift from Buffalo Bill. Her cross-dressing permit from the Paris police hangs in the drawing room. Resting on an easel is an oversized unfinished canvass of horses in motion that Rosa was working on when the Grim Reaper intruded. The walls display the animalier’s canvasses, interspersed with items such as horns and antlers, and a Scottish bagpipe. What might take visitors aback are the taxidermied animals: a crocodile, the heads of a deer, antelope, and horse. A black crow with flapping wings is reminiscent of the one in the Edgar Allan Poe’s poem, “The Raven.”

                

Two portraits of the artist stare at her guests: in one, Rosa is dressed in her knee-length blue smock and black trousers, posing with her palette and her work in progress. Her devoted dogs, Charlie and Daisy, sit by her feet. In the other canvass, painted by Édouard Dubufe, Rosa’s hand rests on a bull; she had vetoed Dubufe’s image of a “boring table” and took it upon herself to paint the animal. A photograph shows Rosa and Anna that reveals their close relationship. In the second-floor salon is a desk and glass-doored cabinet that holds Baccarat glasses, white teacups and saucers, an ashtray with cigarette butts.

 

While France has many storied hotels to lay one’s head, such as the Ritz, associated with Ernest Hemingway and Princess Diana, the Château Rosa Bonheur offers guests an unforgettable overnight experience. The museum’s website offers the tantalizing invitation, “Who hasn’t dreamed of sleeping in the room of an illustrious figure, dining at their table, and listening to the music they loved all the while contemplating the artworks, drawings, and objects that made up their daily life? It is this rare experience that the Château offers its guests.” After visiting the museum, guests can slip into Rosa’s monogrammed sheets–once also shared by Nathalie and an otter. The paraquet floors are worn by age and the footsteps of former occupants. One can also enjoy Rosa’s original furniture. The tearoom is a culinary treat and offers homemade pastries in Limoges plates. The museum also includes an outdoor theater and chamber music performances. 

                

Buried between Nathalie and Anna in Père Lachaise Cemetery, their shared headstone bears the inscription, “Friendship is divine affection.”

 

The Window of Her World: Looking out from her estate over the Seine, Rosa must have marveled that the girl who had “migrated with the birds” had transformed to the chatelaine of a castle

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