Breaking the Mold: A Studio of One’s Own
Read on for an extract discussing the artist Rosa Bonheur and her studio:
Art book publishers Lund Humphries are delighted to be working with The Artist’s Studio Museum Network to share a special extract from the recently published Lund Humphries book, Picturing the Artist’s Studio, from Delacroix to Picasso, by Heather McPherson.
The book traces the reinvention and continued significance of the artist’s studio throughout nineteenth-century France, analysing the studio’s multifaceted role as a creative arena, exhibition space, and site of social exchange. It is available direct from Lund Humphries’ website.
Read on for an extract discussing the artist Rosa Bonheur and her studio:
Rosa Bonheur was a trailblazer of female autonomy and professional and financial success. Trained from an early age by her father, Raimond, who was a drawing master and an ardent Saint-Simonian, she began making copies in the studio and rapidly progressed to painting landscape and animal studies from nature. She rounded out her artistic education by copying Old Masters at the Louvre and studying anatomy at the Roule slaughterhouse. Unlike many women artists, Bonheur received comprehensive training and was encouraged and nurtured by her artist-father, although her childhood was darkened by financial hardship and her mother’s death when she was 11. After her father remarried, Rosa and her younger siblings worked beside him in a studio, which had a large window, a stall for animal models and a bird cage. In 1841, at 19, Bonheur made her debut at the Salon and exhibited regularly thereafter until 1855. A member of the Realist generation, she adhered to the principle of direct observation from nature. Critics lauded her scrupulous technique and verisimilitude, and she rapidly gained renown as an animalier. With Ploughing in the Nivernais (1849), her artistic career was launched. Commissioned by the French government, Bonheur’s timeless evocation of traditional rural life triumphed at the 1849 Salon. The Tedesco brothers, her principal Paris dealers, and the London-based dealer Ernest Gambart, who became a lifelong friend, aggressively marketed her work and besieged her with orders, ensuring her financial success.
In 1849, Bonheur left home to set up her own studio in the rue de l’Ouest, a tranquil artists’ colony near the Luxembourg Gardens. Her picturesque, rustic atelier was featured in L’Illustration in 1852, confirming her rising artistic stature. The high-ceilinged, wood- floored studio was illuminated by an immense, multi- paned window at the rear and adjoined a barn-like space housing horses and livestock that facilitated painting animal subjects. The L’Illustration print depicts Bonheur and her companion, Nathalie Micas, working in the studio, which was crammed with easels and stacks of paintings. At the right Bonheur, her hair cropped short like a young man’s, sits at the easel before a vast canvas, surrounded by studies of horses. The accompanying article extolled Bonheur’s talent and industriousness and mentioned her studies for Horse Fair, which she called her ‘Parthenon Frieze’. Bonheur’s first independent studio set the pattern for the larger, more elaborate studios that she would occupy for the rest of her career.
In 1853, Bonheur moved into a spacious, purpose-built studio in the rue d’Assas; designed by art connoisseur Georges Meusnier, it had a courtyard and extensive gardens. Although no images survive, various visitors, including Eugène de Mirecourt and Armand Baschet, described the studio. Tastefully furnished and papered in green velvet, the studio was on the second floor. On Fridays, Bonheur received artists, writers, musicians and fashionable society, even members of the court, at her studio, which doubled as a salon. The property included a garden with palisaded stables and a menagerie of farmyard animals and fowl that roamed freely in a fenced enclosure. Baschet observed that Bonheur’s domain could almost ‘be taken for a real model farm’. Visitors admired the menagerie and the well-proportioned, light-filled studio. Paintings, sketches, casts and trophy heads decorated the walls; the floor was carpeted with exotic animal pelts. Easels and works in progress, scattered around the room, completed the animal-themed decor. Attracted by Bonheur’s artistic celebrity, visitors were also intrigued by her unconventional appearance and eccentric lifestyle, from her cropped hair to her masculine dress and her habit of riding astride through the streets of Paris. At Chevilly outside Paris, Bonheur repurposed an old barn, used as a second studio and to house additional livestock.
In 1860, Bonheur and Micas abandoned the Paris art world and moved to the bucolic Château de By in Thomery, near Fontainebleau – a move that was financed by the sale of her painting Horse Fair. Bonheur constructed an elegant addition, featuring a spacious, light-filled studio on the second floor, where she could work on large-scale paintings. The studio, which was custom built by Louis-Jules Saulnier, had a huge, north-facing window as well as a south-facing window, to provide as much natural light as possible for painting. Besides this ‘grand studio’, which Bonheur called her ‘sanctuary’, there was a small adjoining photographic studio and a billiard room that was used as a winter studio. From her garden, Bonheur could access the forest; accompanied by her dogs and pet monkeys, she took walks and sketched. She kept a changing menagerie of domestic and wild animals and set up a dissection laboratory to further her study of anatomy.
On 14 June 1864, Empress Eugénie, who admired Bonheur’s work, made a surprise studio visit and commissioned a painting. Bonheur’s fragmentary autobiography recounts scrambling to slip a skirt over her flannel knickerbockers and put on the black jacket that she wore for formal occasions, before the Empress arrived. On 8 June 1865, the final day of her regency, Eugénie made a second visit to award Bonheur the Legion of Honor. She pinned the cross to Bonheur’s jacket and embraced the new chevalier. In bestowing it, Eugénie pointedly asserted, ‘Genius has no sex’. Her first impromptu visit, which was recorded in Charles Maurand’s engraving after Deroy and published on 25 June 1864 in Le Monde illustré, anticipated the formal presentation. In the engraving, the Empress and artist stand at the center of the studio in front of Bonheur’s enormous Family of Deer (1865), and her paint box is visible in the left foreground. Thronged with fashionably dressed attendants in crinolines, the studio is recast as a ceremonial reception hall and imperial stage for Eugénie’s official consecration of a female painter. The first woman to be honored for artistic talent, Bonheur was promoted to the rank of officer in 1894 – another first.
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This is an edited excerpt from Chapter 4 of Picturing the Artist's Studio, from Delacroix to Picasso by Heather McPherson, where full notes and references are available.