GLR March-April 2023

ESSAY

Joining the Rosa Bonheur Revival E MILY L. Q UINT F REEMAN

T HE FRENCH PAINTER Rosa Bonheur (1822 1899) is having a moment after a century of being largely forgotten. On the occasion of the bicente nary of her birth, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris or ganized a major retrospective of her artistic works, including 200 paintings, sculptures, and photographs that the artist produced at the end of the 19th century. The Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux and the Rosa Bonheur Museum contributed to this unparalleled exhibition (which closed on January 15th). Specializing in dramatic, realist pictures of animals in rural settings, Bonheur’s art made her internationally famous and in dependently wealthy, and she was celebrated as the premier ani mal painter of her day (many believe of all time). At the height of her international fame in 1865, the French Empress Eugénie traveled to Bonheur’s residence, known as the Château de By (now the Rosa Bonheur Museum), some 34 miles southeast of Paris on the outskirts of the Fontainebleau Forest. She came to present the 43-year-old painter with the Légion d’honneur, France’s highest honor. with traditional, hyper-realist representation. Bonheur’s work was viewed as passé. If she was mentioned at all, it was to single out her daring, gender-bending lifestyle in an era when women were largely confined to the domestic realm. She never married or part nered with a man. My own discovery of Rosa Bonheur occurred while I was working abroad. I had seen a few of her works in Paris, but then I was afforded a unique opportunity to learn more about her firsthand. By a stroke of luck, I was invited to join a small group of gay Londoners for an art-focused day trip to Fontainebleau Forest (during a “bank holiday,” aka a British excuse for a three day weekend). Our guide would lead us on a walk dubbed “The Painters’ Trail” ( Sentier des Peintres ), stopping at landmarks that became the subject of paintings hanging at the Musée d’Or say. Our day would end at the Rosa Bonheur Museum. Some 45 minutes by train from Paris, the Fontainebleau For est is renowned for two things: Napoleon’s palace, and a stun ning forest that was a favorite plein air studio for many great Emily L. Quint Freeman is the author of the memoir Failure to Appear: Resistance, Identity and Loss (2020). A collection of her essays titled A Garden Variety Lesbian is expected later this year. In the years that followed, however, a new generation of artists began to abandon the ac ademic, realist style of painting that Bonheur epitomized. They painted their impressions of light, color, and modern life, and in the pro cess they completely reimagined painting. Monet, Seurat, Van Gogh, Cézanne, and oth ers created a new æsthetic that parted ways

landscape painters of the 19th century, notably Corot, Rousseau, Manet, Sisley, Monet, and Pissarro. Here in the forest, they stud ied the effects of light, season, and changing colors; in the process, they revolutionized visual art. During our walk, we moved from deep forest to the blind ing light of sand, gorges, and boulders, followed by lunch under elm trees flush with spring. Our guide spoke of a painting we all knew: Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe of 1863. It was seen as a radical statement by a young artist whose own work was still being rejected by the Paris Salon (which extolled the work of Rosa Bonheur and her ilk). Manet’s subject was two men and two women having an outing in Fontainebleau Forest. Outra geously shocking at the time, one of the women is nude and looks daringly relaxed. She gazes directly at us while her male companions lounge fully clothed. Our van took us to the small town of Thomery on the edge of the forest and pulled up at a three-story building with a brick façade: the Rosa Bonheur Museum. The artist purchased the Château de By in 1859 at age 37 during the height of her ac claim. Many decades later, a very special visitor from California arrived at Bonheur’s home. It was in 1897 that an American-born artist named Anna Elizabeth Klumpke (1856–1942) bravely wrote a letter to the famous painter request ing permission to paint Bonheur’s portrait, revealing that she’d been a great admirer from an early age. She had met the artist briefly a few years earlier when employed as a translator by an American art collector who was interested in buying a Bonheur original. Bonheur was intrigued by this much younger painter, about whom good things were being said at the Paris Salon. She agreed to have Klumpke paint her portrait and invited her with out delay to the Château de By. During the train ride from cen tral Paris, Klumpke was both jittery and overjoyed. When she was ushered into Bonheur’s presence, she found a woman with wild silvery hair dressed in trousers and a tailored jacket, who laughed as she caught Klumpke’s expression of surprise, saying said that she dressed this way, not as an act of defiance—or not only that—but also out of practicality, as she painted her sub jects at stables, abattoirs, country fairs, and farms. She had one request of Klumpke, namely that during the long sittings, both women would talk about their past and their path as artists. The younger woman readily agreed to this request. Once inside Bonheur’s studio in the Château de By, I dis covered that somehow everything was still there: her embroi dered blouse, her hat, boots, palettes, paintbrushes, notebooks, even her cigarette butts. The smell of turpentine mingled with the scent of violet perfume. It was in this very room that Klumpke first met Bonheur, who sat in front of the full-length

Bonheur painted herself into The Horse Fair as a participant, dressed in the standard attire of the other (all male) riders.

March–April 2023

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