Rosa Bonheur is one of the most important women artists of all time.
I think it's a fair thing to say.
She was extremely famous in her own day
not just in France but also abroad.
She was really the first female artist to reach that level of international fame.
It's very important to stress.
Rosa Bonheur was born in 1822 in Bordeaux
and her father was actually a painter.
She was mischievous, boyish and a very lively child
and she had decided that her interest was in animals
and that she would draw and paint animals.
She was successful from a very young age
and her father so much believed in her that he predicted
and I quote him, "She would surpass Madame Vigée Le Brun".
She started exhibiting her work at the salon when she was nineteen
and she was very soon awarded medals
doing very well as a very very young woman.
By the time she was thirty, she was able to buy a chateau
where she kept all kinds of animals:
horses, yaks,
even lions
which would serve as subjects, of course, for her paintings.
What really confirmed and consolidated her reputation
was ‘The Horse Fair’.
She started to work on it in 1851
and which she sent to the salon in 1853
and that was a springboard to global fame.
This is a painting which is now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York
and the painting which we have at the National Gallery
is a reduced version, by Rosa Bonheur, of that very large work.
She started to regularly attend horse markets in Paris.
Twice a week, for a year and a half.
So she was very committed.
It was of course extremely unusual for a woman to attend horse markets at that time.
It was a very very much a male sphere
and in fact Rosa complained about being repeatedly harassed.
To avoid this, she actually requested from the Paris police authorities
a special permission to be allowed to wear male clothes.
An artists smock, trousers, and boots.
And she obtained it because she wore her hair short
and had a quite boyish manner, meant that she could work
and focus on her project completely undisturbed.
She is there sketching in a male crowd
depicting a very male scene.
The rider right in the middle of the composition wearing a blue smock
this is believed to be Rosa Bonheur's self-portrait gazing straight at us.
She was actually quite keen on communicating
that image of a woman artist dressed in male attire.
Even though she was modern, critics judging her art
and the public wasn't necessarily that advanced.
The reviewers always remarked the fact that these works
were actually done by a woman:
"This is so good, it could almost have been done by a man".
They were completely unable to judge her work independently from that factor.
It was very hard for a woman intent on pursuing an artistic career
to even train as an artist.
It was believed that women would stay at home
and it is very much the kind of fate that Rosa wanted to avoid.
She had seen what had happened with her mother
who she said was solely preoccupied
with the care of her home and her interior.
She had higher ambitions and was determined to pursue her own path.
Rosa Bonheur never married but she had a longtime partner
Nathalie Micas.
She had first met Nathalie Micas when she was fourteen
a kind of childhood sweetheart.
They ended up living together for so many decades.
She was pretty unambiguous about her sexual orientation
and I quote her: "As far as males go
She also said that her private life was basically no one's business
and didn't want to be judged for her sexual preferences.
Rosa Bonheur is still relevant today because
she really extended the scope of possibilities offered to women.
Not just as a painter, as a woman artist, but also as a woman at all.
She produced images which have had an enormous popular appeal.
She led her life in an incredibly modern way
and had no care what people thought about her.
She pursued her own trajectory.
She was quite close to Napoleon III and his wife Eugénie.
As Eugénie once said, "Genius has no gender"
and I think this is a good way of summing it up.
It encompasses everything about Rosa Bonheur.