Rosa Bonheur – my daily art display

Bordeaux Musée des Beaux-Arts. Part 2. The Bonheur Wing.

The Bonheur Wing, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux.

Behind the Palais Rohan, the seat of the City of Bordeaux whose gardens it shares, the Museum of Fine Arts offers a panorama of the main currents of Western art from the Renaissance to the present day. It occupies two twin wings added to the Palais Rohan in 1851 and opposite, the Galerie des Beaux-Arts completes its permanent collections by regularly hosting temporary exhibitions.

The north wing (Bonheur Wing) is dedicated to modern and contemporary art, presenting the main themes of the 19th Century (romanticism, academicism, and realism), landscapes (Corot, Diaz de la Peña, Boudin), animal paintings (Rosa Bonheur, René Princeteau) and portraits (Thomas Couture, Carolus-Duran, Fantin-Latour and Berthe Morisot).

As the wing of the museum was named to honour the Bordeaux-born artist, Rosa Bonheur, the first couple of paintings in the Bonheur wing of the museum I am showing you are by her or about her.

Rosa Bonheur in her studio by George-Achille Fould (1893)

As the wing of the museum was named to honour the Bordeaux-born artist, Rosa Bonheur, the first couple of paintings in the Bonheur wing of the museum I am showing you are by her or about her. Rosa Bonheur was born in Bordeaux on March 16^th 1822. She was known best as a painter of animals (animalière). She also made sculptures in a realist style.

This portrait of Bonheur in her studio was painted by Georges Achille-Fould. In the painting we can see a detail taken from her monumental painting, Wheat Threshing in the Camargue. Bonheur can be seen wearing trousers which were forbidden at that time for women. However, Bonheur argued for authorisation from the prefecture to wear them during her drawing sessions at the slaughterhouses! She was passionate about animals, and owned a whole menagerie, including a lion, quails, dogs and even some sheep. For her contemporaries, Rosa Bonheur was truly a phenomenon! Her talent was recognized in 1865 when she became the first female artist to be awarded the Legion of Honour.

Georges Achille-Fould en japonaise, portrait by Léon Comerre (1863)

The artist who completed this portrait of Bonheur was Georges Achille-Fould. Georges Achille-Fould and her sister Consuelo, both painters, were adopted by Gheorghe Bibescu, who bequeathed to them the Chateau de Bécon, which today houses the Roybet Fould Museum, where numerous works by Consuelo and Fernand Roybet, her tutor, are displayed, alongside many works attributed to Achille-Fould, who signed them simply “Achille-Fould”.

Wheat Threshing in the Camargue by Rosa Bonheur

Rosa Bonheur started on her largest painting, (313 x 651 cm), Wheat Threshing in the Camargue, in 1864 but on her death in 1899, thirty-five years later, it remained unfinished. This is oil on canvas work is the largest format ever painted by the artist and is a genre scene depicting a dozen horses treading wheat in the Camargue. It is said that Rosa’s ideas for the depiction came from her reading the Mirèio, a long poem consisting of twelve songs by French writer Frédéric Mistral, written in 1859 after eight years of effort. It tells of the thwarted love of Vincent and Mireille, two young Provençal people of different social backgrounds. It was a story about a miserly farmer who made his horses work tirelessly at fulling and who was punished by lightning that set fire to his barn and an earthquake that engulfed his family. In her work, Rosa Bonheur wanted to show “the fire that comes out of the horses’ nostrils, the dust that gushes out under their hooves

Rolla by Henri Gervex (1878)

Now to a completely different type of painting. Rolla was a painting completed by Henri Gervex and is at the museum but on loan from the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Gervex was a French painter and was the son of Joséphine Peltier and Félix Nicolas Gervex, a piano maker. When he was 15, a friend of the family helped him get admitted to the atelier of Pierre-Nicolas Brisset. Three years later, he served in the 152nd Battalion of the National Guard. In 1871, aged 19, he was accepted into the École des Beaux-Arts in the studio of Alexandre Cabanel, where he studied for five years. His early work belonged almost exclusively to the mythological genre, which served as an excuse for the painting of the nude, but not always in the best of taste. He had already been awarded a medal at the Salon, which in theory made him an “outsider” in terms of the competition and therefore any painting he put forward to be included at the Salon was guaranteed inclusion into future exhibitions without having to satisfy the Salon jurists. It therefore came as a shock to him to have his painting, Rolla, for the upcoming 1878 Salon, rejected as the authorities deemed the depiction of his painting Rolla to be “immoral”.

The inspiration for Gerex’s painting came from a long poem by Alfred de Musset entitled Rolla which he completed in 1833. The long poem narrates the story and the destiny of a young bourgeois, Jacques Rolla, who descends into a life of idleness and debauchery. Along the way, he meets Marion, a teenager who has discovered that the life of a prostitute was her only escape from misery. In the painting we see Rolla standing by the window, his eyes turned towards Marion who lies abandoned on the bed. He is desolate and about to commit suicide by taking poison.

Gervex found his inspiration in a long poem by Alfred de Musset (1810-1857), published in 1833. The text recounts

With a melancholy eye Rolla gazed on

The beautiful Marion asleep in her wide bed;

In spite of himself, an unnameable and diabolical horror

Made him tremble to the bone.

Marion had cost dearly. — To pay for his night

He had spent his last coins.

His friends knew it. And he, on arriving,

Had taken their hand and given his word that

In the morning no one would see him alive.

When Rolla saw the sun appear on the roofs,

He went and leaned out the window.

Rolla turned to look at Marie.

She felt exhausted, and had fallen asleep.

And thus both fled the cruelties of fate,

The child in sleep, and the man in death!

So why did the Beaux Arts authorities ban the painting? If the scene had been judged indecent, surely it was not because of Marion’s nudity, which is not unlike the portrayal of nudes by many artists of the time. It appears that the underwear strewn besides the bed denotes Marion’s consent in the sex act and hints at her status as a prostitute. Look at the abandoned clothing and we see a walking stick emerging from the midst of the garments which many believe acts as a metaphor for sexual intercourse.

Following Gervex’s painting Rolla being excluded from the Salon, he exhibited it for three months in the gallery of a Parisian art dealer. The scandal, which was covered in all the newspapers, attracted large crowds to the gallery. In an interview many years later, which was published in 1924, Gervex remembered the pleasure when he witnessed the constant procession of visitors who queued to see the work. Many cynics believed that Gervex had anticipated the reaction to his painting by the authorities and gladly provoked the scandal.

The Lion Hunt by Eugène Delacroix (1855)

In 1855, Delacroix was commissioned by the French State and Napoleon III to produce a monumental work for the that year’s Paris Universal Exposition. Delacroix had studied Rubens’ hunting scenes and was fascinated by the theme of lions. Delacroix often painted hunting scenes and animals fighting. This work is part of a lion hunt series he painted in the 1850s. The subject reflects a fascination for exoticism and the culture of the Muslim countries in North Africa. During a visit to Morocco in the 1830s, Delacroix had studied and made sketches of the landscape, horses and hunters on horseback – themes that were later used when he painted his lion hunts. These dramatic scenes, with their energetic compositions and warm hues, convey the new aesthetic ideals of the time.

The dimensions of his painting, The Lion Hunt, was monumental at 175 x 360cms. Delacroix had spent much time at the Ménagerie part of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. These regular visits allowed him to capture not just the ferocity of the cats and their musculature, but also the colour of their fur which allowed him to develop a more authentic form of animal paintings.

The Tiger Hunt by Rubens (1618)

When Delacroix had completed the painting in 1855 it was deposited at the Museum of Fine Arts of Bordeaux, the city where the painter once lived as a young man when his father was prefect there. Bordeaux was also a city Delacroix occasionally came to pay his respects at the Chartreuse Cemetery, where his father and brother were buried. Bordeaux was also the city in which Peter Paul Rubens had his painting, The Tiger Hunt displayed and which the Bordeaux museum had been exhibiting since 1805, and which is believed to have been a strong influence on Delacroix.

The deputy director and curator in charge of 19th/20th-century collections at the museum, Chloé Theault, believed that the two works would complement each other. The first thing that catches your eye when you study Delacroix’s work is it appears that the top of the painting is missing. In fact, the upper third of it no longer exists, as on December 7th, 1870, a fire ravaged through the town hall in Bordeaux destroying part of the work. The entire upper part of the painting disappeared into the ashes.

The Lion Hunt by Odile Redon (1860-1870)

Today, some sketches and copies, and notably one by Odilon Redon, exists which allow us to imagine what the upper third of Delacroix’s painting would have looked like with the two missing horse riders that were once in the upper section.

The Heirs by Eugène Buland (1887)

Eugène Buland was born on October 26^th, 1852. He was the son of an engraver and entered the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts under the tutelage of Alexandre Cabanel. His earliest works were Symbolist paintings of antique scenes, but he quickly turned towards depicting scenes of everyday life. Eugène Buland entered just one painting, The Heirs, at the Salon in 1887 which gained him a second-place medal. It depicts his predilection for subjects taken from daily life in the countryside.

In this figurative work, Buland concentrates on a study of provincial behaviour, conveying the peaceful, quiet lifestyle and the impression of time almost standing still. In the same way as the French writer, Maupassant, Buland tells short stories, novels in his depictions. The strange ambiguity of the scene here is striking. The tight framing of the scene strengthens the almost oppressive atmosphere of this private meeting in which the stone-faced characters, deep in their own thoughts, wait for the will to be read. The touches of red contrast with the dark austere colours and direct our eye towards the open safe, seals, the official banner and finally the will, the focus of everyone’s attention.

Freeing himself from the teachings of his master Alexandre Cabanel, Buland became influenced in naturalism. He was concerned with the detail and drawing inspired by photographic precision which made him a rare artist and a hyperrealist ahead of his time.

The Day of the Dead by William Bouguereau (1859)

The last selection I am offering you from the Bonheur Gallery of the Bordeaux Musée des Beaux Arts is, like the previous painting, a quietly sombre depiction. There is none of the excitement depicted in the previous seascapes or the savagery of a lion hunt.

The painting entitled The Day of the Dead is by the French academic painter William Bouguereau which he completed in 1859. Bouguereau was born in La Rochelle on November 30^th 1825. During his life, he enjoyed significant popularity in France and the United States, was given numerous official honours, and received top prices for his work

The painting The Day of the Dead, depicts a mother and daughter mourning the loss of a husband and father as they kneel at the foot of a tomb. The work captures the essence of the Mexican tradition of Día de Muertos. It is a depiction of death with the black of the mourning clothes, which are illuminated by the luminous yellow of the wreath of immortelles, the cross and winter itself. Bouguereau creates a painting full of restraint, serious and dignified, one of remarkable beauty. With restraint of feelings, the theme conveys an exaltation of the traditional values of the classical cultural ideal and the Christian faith.

The painting was exhibited at the Salon of 1859, this work was the subject of many glowing reviews.

Anna Elizabeth Klumpke. – Her talented siblings and Rosa Bonheur

Anna Elizabeth Klumpke was born in San Francisco on October 28th 1856. She was the elderst daughter of a German-born father, John Gerald Klumpke and his American wife Dorothea Matilda Klumpke (née Tolle). Her father was born in February 1825 in Suttrup, a small north-west German town in the state of Lower Saxony. Anna’s father was hard-working German immigrant who was raised in New Orleans where he attended college and spent some time studying medicine and other professional courses. In August 1850 with news of the Californian Gold Rush he left Louisiana and headed for California where he was registered as one of the early territorial pioneers.

With the discovery of gold the population in 1848 of San Francisco which had started off as a small Spanish mission nestled in the coastal dunes, was less than one thousand but the following year it had soared to twenty-five thousand. San Francisco boomed and law and order became a serious problem, so much so that the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance was formed in 1851 in response to widespread crime and corruption in the municipal government. This vigilante organisation, which John Klumpke joined, provided an extra layer of legal intervention to counteract the rising wave of crime. John Klumpke’s life as a prospector didn’t last long and the money he made prospecting was sank into real estate which he bought and sold and soon became a very well respected and very wealthy San Francisco citizen.

Portrait de mon père by Anna Elizabeth Klumpke (1888)

Dorothea Mathilde Tolle was born in New York on March 21, 1835. In 1853, at the age of eighteen, she accompanied her older sister who travelled to San Francisco to be reunited with her husband who had set up a gunsmith business in the town. Shortly after arriving in San Francisco, Dorothea met her future husband John Klumpke and the couple were married on October 28^th 1855. The couple went on to have seven children. There were five daughters, Anna Elizabeth was born in 1856, followed by Augusta Maria in 1859, Dorothea in 1861, Mathilde in 1863 and Julia in 1870 and two sons John Wilhelm and George Frederick in 1868.

Before I look closer at the life of the painter Anna Elizabeth Klumpke it is interesting to note that all her siblings were great achievers. Augusta Maria, the second born child, formerly a science student in Lausanne, went to Paris in 1877 to study medicine, and in 1882 became an extern and in 1887 became the first woman in France to be appointed interne des hôpitaux. She studied under Jules Déjerine, a celebrated French neurologist and later in 1888 the two married and had a daughter Yvonne. In 1914, Augusta was elected the first female president of the French Neurological Society.

Dorothea Klumpke was the youngest child of John and Dorothea Klumpke. She initially studied music at the University of Paris but later became interested in astronomy. In 1886, she received her bachelor’s degree and seven years later, in 1893, she was awarded her doctorate and in between she took up a post at the Paris Observatory. Her work consisted of measuring star positions, astrophotography, which is a specialized type of photography for recording photos of astronomical objects and large areas of the night sky. She eventually became Director of the Bureau of Measurements at the Paris Observatory and was elected a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur. She married the Welsh astronomer and astrophysicist, Dr. Isaac Roberts.

Both the fourth-born child, Mathilda Klumpke, and the youngest child Julia, took music lessons at the Paris conservatory. Mathilda became a talented pianist who married Harry Milton Dalton, an American lawyer from Cincinnati, and they had three children. Sadly Mathilda died young in 1893, from diphteria while caring for her sick children. She was just thirty years of age.

Julia Klumpke, the youngest family member who was born in 1870, was a student at Lycée Fénelon, which in 1883 became the first high school of young girls of Paris. Julia studied the violin and subsequently taught the violin to students at the Spartanbourg Girls College, South Carolina.

The fifth child, and the only son to survive infancy, John William Klumpke, was mostly educated in Paris in the heart of the Quartier Latin just across from the Sorbonne at Lycée Louis-le-Grand which was a prestigious secondary school founded in 1563 as the Collège de Clermont, but was renamed in King Louis XIV of France’s honour after he extended his direct patronage to it in 1682. Later John returned to America where he became an engineer.

Having said all that, this blog is all about the eldest daughter Anna Elizabeth Klumpke but I thought it would be of interest for you to see what a set of very gifted siblings she had and one wonders whether that pressurised her to succeed.

Anna Elizabeth Klumpke was the eldest of John Dorothea’s children, born on August 22^nd 1856. Her early life proved traumatic as in the early months of 1860 when she was three and a half years old she had a fall and fractured her femur. Less than eighteen months after this accident she fell again and this resulted in osteomyelitis with purulent knee arthritis and this condition would leave her with a limp for the rest of her life. Her parents sought medical help in America but to no avail and they decided that the best course of treatment was to be found in Europe and so, in 1886, her mother and aunt took Anna Elizabeth and her three sisters and travelled by boat to a specialist, Professor Néalton, in Paris and later to Berlin to consult with Professor Langenbeck where she would remain at his clinic for eighteen months with much time spent taking the healing waters of the local thermal baths.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton by Anna Elizbeth Stanton (1889)
American suffragist, social activist, abolitionist, and leading figure of the early women’s rights movement

Anna’s three sisters went to school in Berlin whilst she, due to her physical condition and medical treatment, received private lessons. She thrived educationally taking lessons in German, French and music. Eventually Anna’s mother and her sisters returned to San Francisco somewhat disappointed that Anna’s hoped-for cure never materialised. Back in California, Anna and her siblings attended the local school but because of their father’s wealth also had home tutoring in music, dance and German.

A Moment’s Rest, Barbizon by Anna Elizabeth Klumpke (1891)

The disappointment of Anna’s mother over the failure to cure her daughter’s physical disability was not the only complication which arose from her long stay in Europe separated from her husband. Despite the birth of two further children, John and George Frederick in 1868, although the latter died before his first birthday, and Julia in 1870, the estrangement of husband and wife led to the break-up of the marriage and she requested and won legal separation and later a divorce, along with custody of all the children. Anna’s mother decided on a clean break from both her husband and America and in April 1871 took all the children, including eight month-old Julia, to Germany to live with her cousin in the town of Gottingen where Anna, who at the time was fifteen years old and thirteen year old Augusta, enrolled at a boarding school in Bad Canstatt, a town close to Stuttgart. In 1873 after the legal ramifications of the separation were concluded and divorce granted, Dorothea took her six children and went to live in Lausanne.

Portrait of a Seated Woman Anna Elizabeth Klumpke (1886)

All the children, with the exception of Anna, attended various schools in Lausanne but Anna studied at home, and as she showed an interest in painting she was enrolled in a course of drawing lessons. In 1876 Anna’s mother was faced with the prospect of losing her two eldest children to further education colleges away from Lausanne but a friend advised her that Paris would be an ideal place to live as it would offer Anna a chance to further her career as an artist in a well-respected atelier de peinture and at the same time offer Augusta the chance to continue her interest in medicine at the prestigious medical faculty of the Sorbonne. There would also be numerous good Parisian schools for the other children and so with her decision made to relocate to the French capital Dorothea Klumpke went to Paris and met with the secretary of the Faculty of Medicine and the secretary of the Faculty of Sciences at the Sorbonne to assess the colleges for Augusta and had a meeting with the artistic director of Académie Julian with regards to enrolling Anna. Dorothea also met with heads of various secondary schools to discuss the schooling of her other children and by October 1876 an apartment had been rented and all the children were attending various schools and colleges.

In the Wash-House by Anna Elizabeth Klumpke (1888)

Anna Klumpke enrolled at the Académie Julian in 1883 and was the pupil of Tony Robert Fleury, Felix de Vuillefroy, William Adolphe Bouguereau and Jules Lefebvre. In 1884, whilst still at the Academy, she exhibited for the first time at the Paris Salon. She excelled at the academy and won a number of awards including one for the outstanding student of the year with her painting entitled An Eccentric. She also won the silver medal at the Versailles Exhibition. She became the first woman to win the Temple gold medal at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. This prestigious art prize was awarded for the best oil painting by an American artist shown at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts’s annual exhibition. She also won the bronze medal at the 1889 Universal Exhibition. She was a regular contributor to the exhibitions at the Salon des Artistes Français.

Catinou Knitting by Anna Elizabeth Klumpke

One of her well known painting is a large one entitled Catinou Knitting which she exhibited at the Salon of 1887 and is now housed at the Brenau University in Gainesville, Georgia. Anna returned to the United States and taught in Boston for a few years.

Antique German Kling Parian Bisque Rosa Bonheur Doll

One of the greatest influences on Anna Klumpke’s was the French artist Rosa Bonheur, an animalière, (painter of animals) known for her artistic realism. Anna’s interest in Bonheur probably goes back to her childhood when as a young girl she was given a doll, known as a “Rosa” Doll. Rosa Dolls were made in the image of Rosa Bonheur, who had become a famous artist and from early childhood Anna was fascinated with the career of this French painter. She first met Rosa in 1887 when she was employed as a translator by an American art collector who was interested in buying some of Bonheur’s artwork.

Ten years later, in 1897 Anna wrote to Rosa Bonheur asking permission to paint her portrait. The two women met for the second time on June 16, 1898 at Rosa’s residence, the Chateau de By at Thomery on the edge of Fontainebleau Forest, which the artist had bought for herself in 1859 when she was at the height of her popularity. Despite the thirty-four year difference in age between Rosa and Anna, they soon became great friends. While Klumpke worked on her first portrait of Bonheur, the two women became close friends and one month later Bonheur asked Anna to join her in both a personal and professional partnership, Anna agreed and the two women signed a formal arrangement to cement their working and personal arrangement in August 1898. Bonheur agreed to build a studio for Anna at By and in return Anna agreed to paint portraits of Bonheur and to write Rosa’s biography. Controversially, as far as her relatives were concerned, Bonheur changed her will and made Klumpke her sole heir. Bonheur used her last will and testament to force legal recognition of her right to transfer her property to another woman. Anna, I am sure, brought a great deal of happiness to Rosa who had been devastated by the death of her lover and long-time companion Nathalie Micas in 1895. Nine months after Anna and Rosa formalised their arrangement Rosa Bonheur died on May 25, 1899, aged seventy-seven.

Rosa Bonheur by Anna Elizabeth Klumpke (1898)

Klumpke painted three important portraits of Bonheur. The first, from 1898, depicted the artist at an easel wearing the men’s clothes for which she had secured a license from the French government. The second portrait, from 1899, depicted Bonheur seated, holding her dog on her lap. Klumpke kept the third portrait of Bonheur, painted posthumously in 1902, for the Musée de l’Atelier de Rosa Bonheur that she established at By, near Fountainebleau, in 1904.

After Bonheur’s death, Klumpke devoted herself to researching the biography Bonheur had asked her to write. It was published in 1908 with the title Rosa Bonheur, sa vie et son oeuvre. It is a merger of biography and autobiography. Anna Klumpke combined her own memories with Bonheur’s first-person account. In the book Anna, Bonheur’s lover and chosen portraitist, tells how she came to meet and fall in love with Bonheur but of course it is Bonheur’s account of her own life story, and delves into such subjects as gender formation, institutional changes in the art world, governmental intervention in the arts, the social and legal regulation of dress codes, and the perceived transgressive nature of female sexual companionship in a repressive society.

Rosa Bonheur’s atelier in Château de By , Thomery

Klumpke continued to paint and exhibit her works in both Paris and the United States, and set up many projects in the name of Rosa Bonheur. In 1914, she established l’Hôpital de Rosa Bonheur at By, where she nursed wounded soldiers until World War I and sometime later, she established the Rosa Bonheur Memorial Art School for Women Painters and Sculptors at By and continued to exhibit both her work as well as Bonheur’s on both continents.

Among the Lilies by Anna Elizabeth Klumpke (1909)

Anna Klumpke was awarded the Legion of Honor by the French government in 1936. During the 1930s, she returned to San Francisco where she painted landscapes and portraits. She died in 1942 at the age of 86 and her ashes were entombed alongside Bonheur’s and those of Nathalie Micas in Père Lachaise cemetery three years later.

Anna Elizabeth Klumpke never married, maybe because her career meant everything to her but also because she chose a committed relationship with another woman, and by doing so she defied all the late Victorian expectation of women. Her artistic work was a visual testament of her life and times, and included the joyous but brief time she loved and lived with Rosa Bonheur.