A Delightful Surprise

When the women artists of today look back in history for examples to follow, they usually limit themselves to the artists of the twentieth century. Sure, an Artemisia Gentileschi here and a Rosa Bonheur there pop up to prove that women have fought for their rights over the centuries, but the larger pattern has been of successful women artists playing the male-dominated game. That dearth of historical heroines makes the lack of attention paid to nineteenth century French artist Adélaïde Labille-Guiard all the more criminal. Laura Auricchio’s Adélaïde Labille-Guiard: Artist in the Age of Revolution, the first book in English to tell the great pioneering portraitist’s story, rights that wrong in a delightful, insightful way. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "A Delightful Surprise."

[Image: Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Head of a Young Woman, French, 1779. Pastel on paper, 21 1/2 x 17 1/2 in. Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum. 96.PC.327]

[Many thanks to Getty Publications for providing me with a review copy of Adélaïde Labille-Guiard: Artist in the Age of Revolution by Laura Auricchio and for the image above.]

Horse Sense

There are many tales of painter fathers influencing their painter sons, but not as many of painter fathers influencing painter daughters. Oscar-Raymond Bonheur, a journeyman painter but a fierce socialist, truly believed in the equality of the sexes and made sure that his daughter, Rosa Bonheur, had every opportunity than a son would have. Born March 16, 1822, Rosa praised her father’s progressive thinking. “To his doctrines I owe my great and glorious ambition for the sex to which I proudly belong and whose independence I shall defend until my dying day,” she wrote. Rosa Bonheur rose to fame primarily on the acclaim of one painting—The Horse Fair (above, from 1853-1855). Almost overnight she became not only a highly decorated artist but was also recognized (and perhaps pigeonholed) as the preeminent artist of animals in the nineteenth century. When other female artists struggled to find a place in the male-dominated world of art, Bonheur battled her way into the “boy’s club” and blazed a path for succeeding generations of female artists.


There’s a lot of George Sand in Rosa Bonheur. Like the great French novelist, Bonheur wore men’s clothing, cut her hair short, and even smoked cigars and cigarettes in public when such things were considered shameful. “But the suit I wear is my work attire, and nothing else,” Bonheur protested. “I was forced to recognize that the clothing of my sex was a constant bother. That is why I decided to solicit the authorization to wear men's clothing from the prefect of police.” Granted official dispensation, Bonheur cut an unusual figure in Paris social circles. The fierce independence her father instilled in her from the beginning continued to be her most powerful weapon. When the Franco-Prussian War began in 1870, the almost fifty-year-old Bonheur wanted to enlist to defend the country she loved. Bonheur is known for her horses primarily, and they do have their own wild energy, but I’ve always loved more Bonheur’s lions, such as Crouching Lion (above, from 1872). Painted around the same time as the Franco-Prussian War, Crouching Lion may be a Bonheur “self-portrait” of herself sitting on the sidelines, wishing that age and gender would allow her to get a piece of the action.

Bonheur’s dress and attitude unfortunately lead to a very modern question: was she a lesbian? Bonheur never married and lived with female friends for most of her life. Such evidence fuels speculation, but we just don’t know. Same-sex relationships in the nineteenth century just don’t fit neatly into our modern categories. Nevertheless, lesbian artists have embraced Bonheur as one of their own. Bonheur’s final companion was an American artist named Anna Klumpke. Anna and Rosa met while Rosa was in the midst of a blooming fascination with the American Wild West. In 1889, Bonheur saw Buffalo Bill Cody perform. She painted an equestrian portrait of Buffalo Bill that same year (above). Buffalo Bill represented a whole mythos of rugged individualism and brave new frontierism that clearly appealed to Bonheur, who lived an entire life as an individual living on the edge. Nearly half a century after The Horse Fair, Bonheur still used the horse as a symbol of the unbridled energy of the individual looking for a way to be free.

Animal Magnetism

In a world and age that seemed to conspire against her sex, Rosa Bonheur was lucky enough to have an enlightened father. Born March 16, 1822, Bonheur benefitted from her father’s belief in Saint-Simonianism, a form of Christian socialism that believed in the equal education for women. That sect held that every living creature possessed a soul, even animals, and, therefore, deserved to be treated as such. Not only did this belief inform the early feminism that helped Bonheur rise, but it instilled in her a profound respect for many animals, which manifests itself in works such as The Horse Fair (above, from 1835-1855). Bonheur loved animals and owned horses, lions, and an otter during her life.



Like Thomas Eakins, Bonheur knew animals from the inside out, attending and even performing dissections of animals. Her knowledge of anatomy fueled the realism of works such as Plowing in Nivernais (above, from 1850), which combined her love of animals with the popularity of rural genre scenes in the nineteenth century. During her lifetime, Bonheur became the most famous and financially successful female artist in the world. When social mores denied her and other female artists access to the human figure, Bonheur instead found drama and expression in the struggles of animals at work. Bonheur truly found a soul yearning for freedom in the animals in her paintings that is as expressive and nuanced as any ascribed to human beings.


Because she never married, wore men’s clothing, smoke cigarettes, and lived in houses with women friends her entire adult life, Rosa Bonheur is today held up not only as the one of the first great modern woman artists but also as one of the first great homosexual artists. Bonheur explained her mannish dress as necessary for someone working with animals all the time. Same-sex relationships in the nineteenth century held an entirely different meaning than they do today. Despite no evidence of sexual relationships with her women companions, modern critics looking for gender-based critiques have latched on to the circumstantial evidence to laud Bonheur as a lesbian pioneer. If that serves their needs in some way, then more power to them. However, I think that such labeling diminishes the real power and versatility of Bonheur’s art, especially in works such as Couching Lion (above, from 1872), which beautifully illustrates the power of the spirit of the lion in the same way that William Blake’s illustrated poem “The Tyger” gets to the essence of the creature. Bonheur’s ability to see past the physical into the spiritual realm of the animal kingdom matches her ability to transcend the limitations imposed on her gender and realize a whole new world of expression.

Horsing Around

Perhaps the greatest painter of the horse ever, George Stubbs was born on August 24, 1724. Stubbs parlayed his lifelong interest in art and anatomy first into a series of medical illustrations for a midwifery text and then into a text on horse anatomy. With his beautifully detailed horse illustrations, Stubbs hit equine gold. Whistlejacket (above), commissioned by the Third Marquess of Rockingham, shows Stubbs amazing ability not only to present horses in all their anatomical wonder but also his ability to capture the sense of personality of these animals that endeared them to their owners. The gratitude of these owners made Stubbs a very, very wealthy artist.

Although Stubbs name is now synonymous with his equine paintings, he also painted other animals, including lions, tigers, giraffes, and even monkeys. Stubbs’ Horse Frightened by a Lion (above) belongs to a series of paintings in which he pitted frightened horses against the king of the jungle. Exotic animals from the jungles of Africa toured England and Europe throughout the 18th century as curiosities and presented Stubbs with an opportunity to expand his repertoire. I’ve always wondered if Eugene Delacroix knew of Stubbs’ paintings of lions and tigers and horses battling. The many late works of Delacroix showing such scenes definitely belong to the fevered Romantic style of his era, but you can also see some early Romantic drama in Stubbs’ blazingly white stallion rearing away from the lion emerging from the darkness.

Despite attempts at pastoral landscapes and history painting, Stubbs fell prey to his own success and never truly escaped the label of the painter of horses. Like Edward Hicks with his Peaceable Kingdom series, Stubbs will always be a one-hit wonder. I like to imagine some frustration on Stubbs’ face in his Self-Portrait from 1781 (above), presenting him as an acclaimed, wealthy, and perhaps bored painter at the age of 57. Other painters have won some glory with paintings of horses (Rosa Bonheur comes to mind) and others have more accurately presented how horses move (such as Thomas Eakins in his A May Morning in the Park [The Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand]), but perhaps no one else knew the horse from the inside out, from its heart to its soul, the way that Stubbs did.