Empress Eugénie, the wife of Napoleon III, arrived unannounced at the chateau one day and was so impressed with Bonheur’s work that she returned to pin the medal of Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur on the painter’s bosom. She was sought after by royals, statesmen and celebrities. Her paintings brought her colossal fame and fortune during her lifetime. She was an eccentric and a pioneer who wore men’s clothes, never married and championed gender equality, not as a feminist for all women but for herself and her art. That she was a woman with a gift for self-promotion contributed to her celebrity-and her notoriety. Shattering female convention, she painted animals in lifelike, exacting detail, as big and wild as she wanted, studying them in their natural, mud-and-odor-filled settings. There were other female painters in her day, but none like Bonheur. Sheep by the Sea, 1865 / National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC, Gift of Wallace and Wilhemina Holladay, photograph by Lee Stalworth The casual naturalism of Sheep by the Sea, commissioned by Empress Eugénie and completed in 1865, is enlivened by Bonheur’s rigorous studies of animal physiognomy. This article is a selection from the November issue of Smithsonian magazine Buy Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $12 But the walls are streaked with water from a leaking roof, and horsehair stuffing spills out of some of the chairs. Her wire-rimmed eyeglasses rest on a low wooden desk her sheet music sits on the grand piano. In the other, she is portrayed as a young androgynous-looking woman with the permission of Édouard Dubufe, the artist, she painted in a bull where he had painted a table. Her dogs Daisy and Charlie sit at her feet. In one, dressed in her uniform of a knee-length blue smock over black trousers, she poses with her artist’s palette and a painting she is working on. Two portraits of Bonheur look out at the viewer. Next to the easel on the parquet floor sprawls the golden skin of Fathma, Bonheur’s pet lioness, who roamed freely throughout the chateau and died peacefully here. Stuffed birds sit atop a cupboard, while a stuffed black crow with flapping wings looks as if it is about to take flight. The walls are cluttered with her paintings, animal horns and antlers, a Scottish bagpipe, and taxidermied animals-a small stuffed crocodile, the heads of deer and antelope and of her beloved horse. Her worn brown leather lace-up boots, matching riding gaiters and umbrella sit on the chair with her artist’s smock. The atelier is a reflection of her life, frozen in time. The richest and most famous female artist of 19th-century France, Marie-Rosalie Bonheur lived and worked here at her small Château de By, above the Seine River town of Thomery, for almost 40 years. Bonheur was working on the painting at the time of her death in 1899. Horses on the periphery are silhouettes in brown. The artist, Rosa Bonheur, has filled in the animals in the foreground and some of the sky and the sun-parched ground. Perched on an easel is a vast unfinished canvas, showing horses running in frantic motion. Beside it is a cushioned wooden pole to support the artist’s arm when it tired. A carved oak case contains the artist’s tools: small bottles of pigments, paint tubes, palettes, brushes. The soft sunlight of a late afternoon streams into the atelier, dapples the 20-foot-high walls, and rests on a paint-stained blue smock draped over an upholstered chair.
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