Rosa Bonheur, Salon Success

"Head of a Calf" by Rosa Bonheur

"Rosa Bonheur certainly carried out her intention of 'doing better,' for the next year a great advancement was seen in the five pictures she sent to the Salon, and apart from this it marked her absolute breaking from the tradition which had ordained that when animals were painted only certain types should be used.

A long holiday she spent in Auvergne in that summer, in which she made a careful study of the superb bulls and oxen of that region, and the various types which had been bred from them, was the beginning of a minute examination into the differentiation in type of sheep, horses, and other animals, an examination which brought an added reality to her pictures, for besides the complete anatomical knowledge she had gained by moulding and by dissection, it gave her brush a physiological certainty.

In 1847 her four pictures of cows, sheep, oxen, and horses were so faithful to the various types represented, that they raised heated discussion between those members of the jury of the Salon who were still bound by the old tradition of conventional animals conventionally represented, and the followers of  the newer school whose theory was that nature, under all its forms, should be painted as it is seen.

Luckily for Rosa this struggle of opinion was ended in 1848 by the Revolution which drove Louis Philippe from the throne of France, and instituted the second Republic in his stead. The new government ordered that all pictures sent to the Salon that year were to be accepted without exception, and that the artists themselves were to nominate a commission of forty members who, with the help of the officials of the Musee Nationale, were to hang the pictures for exhibition.

The result proved that revolution had spread from politics to art, for the majority of the men voted to the commission by their fellow artists had been rigorously excluded from the Salon by the old jury. Rosa Bonheur sent six pictures and two pieces of sculpture to that famous exhibition, which placed her feet firmly on the topmost rung of the ladder. Her paintings were surrounded daily by admiring crowds, whilst the commission itself awarded her a medal of the first class."

To be continued

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