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Early artwork by Rosa Bonheur depicting a pair of horses ploughing a field, painted when she was only 22 years old. Displayed at the Paris Salon in 1845, where it won third prize, resulting in a government commission of 3000 franks, which led to her first major success as an artist, Labourage nivernais (Ploughing in Nivernais), which was shown at the Salon in 1849 and won first prize.
Rosa Bonheur was born in Bordeaux in 1922 to Oscar-Raymond Bonheur, a landscape and portrait painter, and Sophie Bonheur, a piano teacher, her three siblings were also artists. The Bonheurs were of Jewish origin, but practiced Saint-Simonianism, which mixed Christian and socialist ideas, and, importantly for Rosa, taught that women should be educated, productive members of society. Rosa was a talented artist from a young age, but was disruptive at school and had to be taught to read and write by her mother. She was apprenticed to a seamstress at twelve, but proved highly uncooperative, leading her father to relent and allow her to work and study in the family studio. She was particularly interested in animals, and as well as painting animals in the studio, travelled to the countryside around Paris to study animals in agricultural and wild settings, and studied animal anatomy in the abattoirs of Paris, effectively copying the steps male artists of the time followed to learn to paint human subjects (life studios of the time were strictly off-limits to women, other than as models).
Rosa Bonheur is generally considered to be the most successful female artist of the nineteenth century, as well as the best animal artist. Her artwork was popular during her lifetime, often selling for large sums and appearing in leading galleries in Europe and America. She was introduced to Queen Victoria, who admired her work, during a trip to Scotland. In achieving this success, she overcame not just the obstacles associated with being a woman in art (not inconsiderable in the nineteenth century), but also of being a woman with a decidedly unconventional lifestyle. She wore her hair short, smoked, and regularly wore men's clothing, obtaining a permit from the police to wear trousers on the basis of her work with animals (it was made illegal for women to wear trousers without a permit in France in 1800, a law which was not repealed until 2013, and while this law was not generally enforced in the second half of the twentieth century, it certainly was in the eighteenth). Furthermore, while she never officially admitted to being a lesbian, she openly lived with a female partner, Jeanne Sarah Nathalie Micas, for over 40 years, and when Micas died in 1889, entered into a similar relationship with American artist Anna Elizabeth Klumpke, who was 34 years her junior. Upon her death in 1899 Rosa Bonheur was buried in the same tomb as Nathalie Micas; when Anna Elizabeth Klumpke died in 1942 she was also placed in the same tomb.
