Rosa Bonheur at the Chateau of By

"A Lion's Head" by Rosa Bonheur

"After the great Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1855, to which she sent 'Haymaking in Auvergne,' for which she received a medal, Rosa Bonheur practically ceased to exhibit her pictures. 'The Horse Fair' and other pictures had given her work so great a vogue in England and America that she could not keep pace with the commissions that flowed in upon her. 

The periodical return of the opening of the Salon and the necessity of pictures being finished by a certain date, placed a restraint upon her work which she found most irksome, and for twelve years she was entirely unrepresented in the annual exhibition in Paris, a fact that made her most unpopular with the French artists and critics, and, in some degree, also with the French public, and explains in a great measure why her work was always less favourably regarded in France than in England.

After 1855 she devoted herself wholly to supplying the demand for her work in England, leaving Paris in 1860 to settle at the Chateau of By in the Forest of Fontainebleau, where she could have her numerous living models properly housed and be free from all social interruptions. Here, surrounded by sheep, gazelles, deer, goats, birds, horses, cows, every variety of breed of dog, boars, lions, monkeys, parroquets, ponies from Skye and Iceland, bulls and wild horses from America, the next five years of her busy life passed in a round of unceasing labour. 

'I live here happily,' she wrote, 'far from the world, working my hardest and receiving visits only from intimate friends.' The list of pictures that came from her easel during his period was a portentous one, and in 1862 she achieved one of the greatest of her successes  by the pictures she sent to the Exhibition held that year in London."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Rosa Bonheur"by Frank Hird.)