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gifts he may be endowed with by nature, talent cannot be improvised; it is the fruit of independent and sustained toil. Later on, when she in her turn became a teacher, Rosa Bonheur was able to proclaim the necessity of line-work with all the more authority because it had always been the fundamental basis, the very scaffolding of all her works. "It is the true grammar of art," she would affirm, "and the time thus spent cannot fail to be profitable in the future."

During this period of study, she was living in the Rue de la Bienfaisance; her father's mania for changing his residence dragged her successively to the Rue du Roule, and then to the Rue Rumford, in the level stretch of the Monceau quarter, where Raymond Bonheur, who had just remarried, installed his new household.

At that time the Rue Rumford was practically in the open country. On all sides there were farms abundantly stocked with cows, sheep, pigs, and poultry. This was an unforeseen piece of good fortune for young Rosa, and she felt her passionate love for animals reawaken. Equipped with her pencils, she installed herself at a farm at Villiers, near to the park of Neuilly, and there she would spend the entire day, striving to catch and record the different attitudes of her favourite models. For the sake of greater accuracy, she made a study of the anatomy of animals, and even did some work in dissection. Not content with this, she applied herself to sculpture, and made models of the animals in clay or wax before drawing them. This is how she came to acquire her clever talent for sculpture which would have sufficed to establish a reputation if she had not become the admirable painter that we know her to have been.

Her special path was now determined: she would be a painter of animals. She understood them, she knew them, and loved them. But it did not satisfy her to study them out-of-doors; she wanted them in her own home. She persuaded her father to admit a sheep into the apartment; then, little by little, the menagerie was increased by a goat, a dog, a squirrel, some caged birds, and a number of quails that roamed at liberty about her room.

From this time forward, she sent pictures to the Salon annually. During the first years her exhibits passed unnoticed; but little by little her sincerity and the vigour of her talent made an impression upon the critics. The latter were soon forced to admire the intense relief of her method of painting, living animals transcribed in full action, and their different physiognomies rendered with admirable fidelity and art. But what labour it cost to arrive at this degree of perfection! Every morning, the young artist made the rounds of slaughter-houses, markets, the Museum, anywhere and everywhere that she might see and study animals. And this was destined to continue throughout her entire life.

Her success was progressive. Her pictures in the Salon of 1843 sold to advantage and Rosa Bonheur was able to travel. She brought home from her trip five works that found a place in the Salon of 1845. The following year her exhibits produced a sensation. Anatole de la Forge devoted an enthusiastic article to her, and the jury awarded her a third-class medal.

"In 1845," Rosa Bonheur herself relates, "the recipients had to go in person to obtain their medals at the director's office. I went, armed with all the courage of my twenty-three years. The director of fine-arts complimented me and presented the medal in the name of the king. Imagine his stupefaction when I replied: 'I beg of you, Monsieur, to thank the king on my behalf, and be so kind as to add that I shall try to do better another time.'"

Rosa Bonheur kept her word: her whole life was a long and sustained effort to "do better." After the Salon of 1846, where she was represented by five remarkable exhibits, she paid a visit to Auvergne, where she was able to study a breed of cattle very different from any that she had hitherto seen and painted: superb animals of massive build, with compact bodies, short and powerful legs, and wide-spread nostrils. The sheep and horses also had a characteristic physiognomy that was strongly marked and noted with scrupulous care, and enabled her to reappear in the Salon of 1847 with new types that gathered crowds around her canvases, to stare in wonderment at these animals which were so obviously different from those which academic convention was in the habit of showing them.

The general public admired, and so did the critics. It was only the jury that remained hostile towards this independent and personal manner of painting, which ignored the established procedure of the schools and based itself wholly upon inspiration and sincerity; accordingly, they always took pains to place her pictures in obscure corners or at inaccessible heights. The public, however, which always finds its way to what it likes, took pains on its part to discover and enjoy them.

In 1848 Rosa Bonheur had her revenge. The recently proclaimed Republic, wishing to show its generosity towards artists, decreed that all works offered that year to the Salon should without exception be received. As to the awards, they were to be determined by a jury from which the official and administrative element was to be henceforth banished. The judges were L?on Cogniet, Ingres, Delacroix, Horace Vernet, Decamps, Robert-Fleury, Ary Scheffer, Meissonier, Corot, Paul Delaroche, Jules Dupr?, Isabey, Drolling, Flandrin, and Roqueplan.

Her success was complete. Judged by her peers, in the absence of academic prejudice, she obtained a medal of the first class.

This year an event took place in her domestic life. As a result of recent remarriage, her father had a son, Germain Bonheur. The house had become too small for the now enlarged family; besides, the crying of the child, and the constant coming and going necessitated by the care that it required seriously interfered with Rosa's work. Accordingly she left her home in the Rue Rumford and took a studio in the Rue de l'Ouest. She was accompanied by Mlle. Micas, the old-time friend of her childhood, whom she had rediscovered, and who from this time forth attached herself to Rosa with a devotion surpassing that of a sister, and almost like that of a mother. She also was an artist and took a studio adjoining that of her friend; several times she collaborated on Rosa's canvases, when the latter was over-burdened with work. After Rosa had sketched her landscape and blocked in her animals, Mlle. Micas would carry the work forward, and Rosa, coming after her, would add the finishing touch of her vigorous and unfaltering brush. But to Rosa Bonheur Mlle. Micas meant far more as a friend than as a collaborator. With a devoted and touching tenderness she watched over the material welfare of the great artist, who was by nature quite indifferent to the material things of life. It was the good and faithful Nathalie who supervised Rosa's meals and repaired her garments. She was also a good counsellor, and on many different occasions Rosa Bonheur paid tribute to the intelligence and devotion of her friend.

The resplendent successes of recent Salons had in no wise diminished Rosa Bonheur's ardent passion for study. In contrast to many another artist, who think that there is nothing more to learn, as soon as they become known, she persevered without respite in her painful drudgery of research and documentation.

Every day she covered the distance from the Rue de l'Ouest to the slaughter-houses in order to catch some hitherto unknown aspect of animal life, and to note the quivering of the wretched beast that scents the blood and foresees its approaching death.

There was much that was disagreeable for a young woman in this daily promiscuous contact with butchers, heavy, tactless brutes, who frequently insulted her with their vulgar and suggestive jokes. She pretended not to understand, but nothing short of her unconquerable passion for study would have sustained her courage.

The subject of the picture is well known: in a pleasant stretch of rolling country, bounded by a wooded slope, two teams of oxen are dragging their heavy ploughs and turning up a field in which we see the furrows that have already been laid open. The whole interest centres in the team in the foreground. The six oxen which compose it, ponderous and slow, convey a striking impression of tranquil force: and from the different attitudes of the six, we perceive a progression in the degree of effort put forth to drag the plough. The first two move with a heavy nonchalance that bears witness to the slight contribution that they make to the task; the next two, being nearer the plough, are doing more real work; their straining limbs sink deeper into the earth and their lowered heads indicate the greater tension of their muscles. As to the last two, they are sustaining the heaviest part of the toil, as is apparent from the way in which their muscles visibly stand out, and from the contraction of their limbs gathered under them in the effort to drag free the weight of the ploughshare buried in the soil. It is only those who never have witnessed the tilling of the soil who could remain unmoved in the presence of such a work. The oxen are admirable in composition, in action, in modelling, and in strength. And what is to be said of the landscape which is bathed in a clear, bright light, flecked here and there with trails of fleecy cloud?

This celebrated canvas has a lengthy history which deserves to be related.

As to the reduced copy, the property of Mr. Jacob Bell, the latter bequeathed it, together with his other paintings, to the National Gallery, where it now is. The reproduction which we give in the present volume was made from this smaller copy.

After her immense success at the Salon of 1854, Rosa Bonheur gave up her studio in the Rue de l'Ouest, and installed herself in the Rue d'Assas, in a studio which she had had built expressly to suit her needs.

THE YEARS OF GLORY

The new studio in the Rue d'Assas was very far from being a commonplace studio. It was situated in the rear of a large court, and occupied the entire rear building. It was an immense room, with a broad, high window, through which a superb flood of daylight streamed in; and from floor to ceiling the walls were lined with studies, drawings, sketches, rough essays in colour, that the great artist had brought back from her travels. So far, nothing the least out of the ordinary. But what gave the establishment its picturesque and curious character was the court-yard, transformed by Rosa Bonheur into a veritable farm. Under shelters arranged along the walls a variety of animals roamed at will: goats, heifers of pure Berri breed, a ram, an otter, a monkey, a pack of dogs, and her favourite mare, Margot. Mingled with the divers cries of this heterogeneous menagerie, were the bewildering twitterings of an assortment of birds, the clucking of hens, the sonorous quack-quack of ducks, and dominating all the rest, the strident screams of numerous parrakeets.

And all this was only one part of her menagerie; the rest was domiciled at her country place at Chevilly, where she also had another studio. Even in the country Rosa Bonheur had no chance to rest. She had now become celebrated, and the patrons of art fought among themselves for her productions. The two art firms of Tedesco in Paris and Gambard in London deluged her with orders; and, in spite of her courage, she could hardly keep pace with them.

Equally enthusiastic over her paintings was Mr. Gambard, who supplemented his enthusiasm with a very warm personal friendship for the great artist. He had several times invited her to visit England; in 1854 Rosa Bonheur made up her mind to take the journey, accompanied by Mlle. Micas. It proved to be a triumphal journey. After a sojourn at the Rectory at Wexham, with Mr. Gambard as host,--a sojourn marked by official invitations and delicate attentions,--Rosa Bonheur made a long excursion into Scotland, accompanied by friends across the Channel.

Rosa Bonheur worked with desperate energy in the midst of her models and delighted in portraying them in a setting of some one of those picturesque and impressive vistas of the forest of Fontainebleau, adjacent to her own residence. She was unremittingly productive; yet France hardly heard her name mentioned save as an echo of her triumphs abroad. England has gone wild over her paintings; and America was not slow in following suit.

But the echo was so loud, especially after the Universal Exposition at London in 1862, that the government three years later made her Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. Rosa Bonheur has given her own account of the event:

"In 1865," she writes, "I was busily engaged one afternoon over my pictures , when I heard the cracking of a postillion's whip and the rumble of a carriage. My little maid F?licit? entered the studio in great excitement:

"'Mademoiselle, mademoiselle! Her Majesty the Empress!'

"I had barely time to slip on a linen skirt and exchange my long blue blouse for a velvet jacket.

"'I have here,' the empress told me, 'a little gift which I have brought you on behalf of the Emperor. He has authorized me to take advantage of the last day of my regency to announce your appointment to the Legion of Honour.'

"And in conferring the title, she kissed the newly made Chevalier and pinned the cross upon my velvet jacket. A few days later I received an invitation to take breakfast at Fontainebleau where the Imperial Court was installed. On the appointed day, they sent to fetch me in gala equipage. On arriving, I mistook the door and was about to lose my way, when M. Mocquard came to my rescue and offered his arm to escort me. At breakfast, I was placed beside the Emperor and throughout the whole repast he talked to me regarding the intelligence of animals. The Empress afterwards took me for an excursion on the lake in a gondola. The Prince Imperial, who had previously called upon me at By, accompanied us. This visit to the Court greatly interested me, but I think that I must have been a disappointment to Princess Metternich who amused herself with watching my every movement, expecting no doubt to see me commit some breach of etiquette."

It is necessary here to open a parenthesis and refer to a period in the life of the great artist which should not be passed over in silence: the period of her art school. For this purpose we must turn back to the year 1849. At that time Raymond Bonheur who, as we know, gave drawing lessons, was directing a school of design for young girls, situated in the Rue Dupuytren. One year after his appointment as director, Raymond Bonheur died and the direction of the school was instructed to Rosa, who enlisted the aid of her sister, also a painter of some talent, who was subsequently married to M. Peyrol.

"Go back to your mother," she would say, "and mend your stockings or do embroidery work."

But this pedagogical rigour was promptly offset by a return of her natural kindliness, a jesting word, a pleasantry, an affectionate term intended to prevent the discouragement of a pupil who often was guilty of nothing worse than thoughtlessness.

Under her firm and able guidance, the school achieved success. Many of her graduate pupils attained an honourable career in painting, and if no name worthy of being remembered is included among the whole number, the reason is that genius cannot be manufactured and that it was not within the power of Rosa Bonheur to give to her young pupils something of herself.

In 1860, the great artist, being overburdened with work and unable to carry on simultaneously the instruction and practice of her art, resigned her position as director. The school passed into the hands of Mlle. Maraudon de Monthycle, who won distinction as a director, but did not succeed in making the name of Rosa Bonheur forgotten.

The time of her retirement as professor of the school of design coincides with that of her installation at By. After having in a measure obeyed the paternal tradition of repeated removals, she was this time definitely established. It was destined to be her last residence; and it certainly was an attractive place, that great chateau of By, with its broad windows and its original style, which called to mind certain dwellings in Holland. And what a delightful setting it had in the shape of the forest of Fontainebleau, so varied in aspect, so rich in picturesque corners, so alluring with the beauty of its dense woodlands, and the poetry of its open glades!

Rosa Bonheur was always passionately enamoured of nature, of the entire work of creation. She adored animals neither more nor less than she loved beautiful trees and broad horizons; she went into ecstacies before the splendour of the rising sun which day by day brings a renewed thrill of life to all things and creatures; and it was equally one of her joys to watch the diffused light spreading softly through a misty haze over the slumbering earth.

Relieved of all outside interruption, Rosa Bonheur worked with indefatigable energy. Yet she could hardly keep pace with the demands of her purchasers, who were constantly increasing in number and constantly more urgent. Her paintings had acquired a vogue abroad and brought their weight in gold. Certain pictures brought speculative prices in America even before they were finished and while they were still on the easel at By. At this period, it may be added, everything which came from the artist's brush possessed an incomparable and masterly finish. Never a suggestion of weakness in design even in her most hastily executed canvases. I must at once add that hasty canvases are extremely rare in the life work of Rosa Bonheur; she had too high a sense of duty to her art and too great a respect for her own name to slight any necessary work on a canvas. Certain pictures appear to have been done rapidly solely because the artist possessed among her portfolios fragmentary studies made from nature and drawn with scrupulous care, and all that she needed to do was to transfer them to her canvas.

The war of 1870 brought consternation to her patriotic soul. She suffered cruelly from the ills which had befallen her country. Generous by nature and a French woman to her inmost fibre, she did her utmost to relieve the suffering that she saw around her as a result of the Prussian invasion. She spoke words of comfort to the peasants and aided them with donations, distributing bags of grain that were sent to her by her friend Gambard, at this time consul at Odessa.

One day a Prussian officer of high rank presented himself at her home in the name of Prince Karl-Frederick. The latter, who was a confirmed admirer of the artist, whom he had met in former years, sent her an order of safe-conduct which would place her and her belongings beyond the danger of any annoyance. Rosa Bonheur ran her eye over the paper and in the presence of the officer tore it into tiny pieces. Nobly and simply the great artist refused to accept any favours, feeling, in view of the existing painful circumstances, that it would be a shameful thing for her to do. A French woman before all else, she submitted in advance to all the abuses and exigencies of the conquerors. On another occasion, a German prince came to By, to pay his respects. She refused to receive him. We should add that the Prussians, whose excesses and brutalities were so frequent during that campaign, had the wisdom not to meddle with Rosa Bonheur.

After the treaty of peace was signed, she set herself eagerly to work once more. "I was occupied at that time," she wrote, "in studying the big cats; I made sketches at the Jardin des Plantes, in the circuses, in the menageries, anywhere and everywhere that I could find lions and panthers."

In all the animals that she painted,--and she painted nearly all the animals there are,--Rosa Bonheur succeeded in reproducing their separate characteristic expressions, "the amount of soul which nature has bestowed upon them." M. Roger Mil?s, the excellent art critic, from whom we have frequently borrowed in the course of this biography, expresses it in the following admirable manner:

"Through the infinite study that she made of animals, Rosa Bonheur reached the conviction that their expression must be the interpretation of a soul, and since she understood the types and the species that her brush reproduced, she was able, through an instinct of extraordinary precision, to endow them, one and all, with precisely the glance and the psychic intensity that belongs to them. She takes the animals in the environment in which they live, in the setting with which their form harmonizes, in short, in the conditions that have played an essential part in their evolution, and she records with inflexible sincerity what nature places beneath her eyes and what her patient study has permitted her to understand. It is more especially for this reason, among many others, that the work of Rosa Bonheur deserves to live, and that the eminent artist stands to-day as one of the most finished animal painters with which the history of our national art is honoured."

In the peaceful and laborious atmosphere of By, the years slipped happily away. But before long a cloud came to darken this serenity. The health of her tenderly loved friend, Mlle. Micas, began to decline; the doctor ordered a southern climate. Rosa Bonheur did not hesitate; she had a villa built at Nice, and every year, during the winter, the artist accompanied her beloved invalid to the land of sunshine. These annual changes of climate and the care with which Rosa Bonheur surrounded her friend certainly delayed the fatal issue. But the disease had taken too deep a hold. Mlle. Micas passed away on the 24th of June, 1889. "This loss broke my heart," wrote the artist. "It was a long time before I could find in my work any relief from my bitter pain. I think of her every day and I bless the memory of that soul which was so closely in touch with my own."

From that day onward, Rosa Bonheur became a prey to melancholy, and her thoughts turned ceaselessly to the tender friend whom she had lost forever. None the less, she continued to work with dogged energy, quite as much to deaden her pain as to satisfy the ever increasing orders.

A great joy, however, came to her in the midst of her sorrow. President Carnot, imitating the Emperor, came in person to bring her the Cross of Officer of the Legion of Honour. She was keenly appreciative of such a mark of high courtesy, which was at the same time a well deserved recompense for an entire life consecrated to art. Rosa Bonheur possessed a number of decorations, notably the Cross of San Carlos of Mexico which was given her by the Empress Charlotte, the Cross of Commander of the Order of Isabella the Catholic, the Belgian Cross of Leopold, the Cross of Saint James of Portugal, etc. The noble artist accepted these distinctions gratefully, but was in no way vain of them, for no woman was ever more simple or more modest than she.

At about this epoch, she devoted herself for a time to pastel work, and in 1897 exhibited four examples of ample dimensions and representing various animals. The whole city of Paris flocked to this exhibition and unanimously proclaimed her talent as a pastel painter.

The concert of regrets which greeted her death was touching in its unanimity. Without a dissenting note, without reserve, the entire press paid tribute to the dignity of her life, the nobility of her character, the greatness of her talent. According to her desire, she was interred in the cemetery of P?re-Lachaise; and the cort?ge which followed her coffin was made up of every eminent figure known to the Parisian world of art and letters. Strangers came in throngs, especially from England. And this innumerable cort?ge that followed her bier testified more eloquently than any panegyric to the goodness of this admirable artist who had been able to lead a long and glorious career without creating a single enemy.

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