The Trailblazing French Artist Rosa Bonheur Is Finally Getting the Attention She Deserves
▻https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/redemption-rosa-bonheur-french-artist-180976027
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. The atelier is a reflection of her life, frozen in time. Her worn brown leather lace-up boots, matching riding gaiters and umbrella sit on the chair with her artist’s smock. 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. Stuffed birds sit atop a cupboard, while a stuffed black crow with flapping wings looks as if it is about to take flight.
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Today she is largely forgotten. Mention her name to Parisians and they are likely to evoke the sites in the city named after her—a nightclub-boat on the Seine, a creperie in the Jardin des Tuileries, and a bar-restaurant in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont. Her chateau is not cited in most guidebooks of the area, even though the vast royal chateau at Fontainebleau, one of the country’s top tourist attractions, is only a few miles away. Her painting Haymaking in the Auvergne, in the Fontainebleau chateau, sits in a room open to the public for only a few hours a month.
