Rosa Bonheur Biography | Oil Painting Reproductions

Rosa Bonheur father Oscar-Raymond Bonheur was a landscape and portrait painter who turned into a companion of Francisco Goya when Goya was living in exile in Bordeaux in the 1820s. Bonheur's more youthful brothers and sisters include the animal painters Auguste Bonheur and Juliette Bonheur and the animal sculptor Isidore Jules Bonheur.

Rosa Bonheur moved to Paris in 1828 at six years old with her mom and siblings, her dad having ventured out in front of them to set up a residence and income. However, even before she could talk she would draw for hours with pencil and paper. To cure this her mom showed her to read and write by having her select and draw a creature for each letter of the alphabet. Although she was sent to class like her brothers, she was a problematic disruptive child in the classroom and was removed from various schools.

Bonheur the Most Famous Female Painter of the 19th Century.

As was customary in the art schools of the period, Rosa Bonheur started her training by reproducing pictures from drawing books and sketching from plaster models. As her training advanced she started to make studies of domesticated animals' life, incorporating stallions, sheep, dairy animals, goats, rabbits, and other animals in the fields on the edge of Paris. At age fourteen she started to duplicate paintings at the Louvre. Among her most loved painters were Nicholas Poussin and Peter Paul Rubens.

She additionally studied animal anatomy and osteology by going to the abattoirs of Paris and by performing dissections of animals at the École Nationale Vétérinaire d'Alfort, the National Veterinary Institute in Paris. There she arranged detailed studies which she would later use as references for her compositions and figures.

Rosa Bonheur got a French government commission which led to her first great achievement, Plowing in the Nivernais, shown in 1849. Her most celebrated work was the monumental Horse Fair, finished in 1855, which measured eight feet high by sixteen feet wide. It prompted global notoriety and acknowledgment and that same year she ventured out to Scotland, She was particularly famous in England, but less so in her native France.

Rosa Bonheur was known for wearing men's garments, her selection of companions, and her inclination to smoke cigarettes. On her wearing of pants, she said at the time that her decision of clothing was essentially practical as it facilitated her work with animals.

Rosa Bonheur is generally thought to be the most celebrated not only female painter but an animal painter of the nineteenth century. A considerable lot of her canvases, which had not beforehand been shown publicly, were sold at auction in Paris in 1900. One of her works, Monarchs of the Forest, sold at auction in 2008 for over US$205,000.

Art Movement: Realism.
Artists Influencing Rosa Bonheur: Nicholas Poussin, Peter Paul Rubens.
She Traveled To Scotland, England.
Artist's Biography compiled by Albert L. Mansour at The World's Artist, with text adapted from Wikipedia.