Rosa Bonheur

Throughout her life, Rosa Bonheur ceaselessly reviewed her childhood, attempting to compost a satisfactory image

from its hectic, often disrupted sequence.  Her father, Raimond, a modestly successful artist, exercised enough authority to make all four of his children artists and he took his place in her memory as the strongest formative influence in her life. Her artistic success, she always told interviewers, was entirely due to his tenacity and faith.

Rosa Bonheur’s  memory of her childhood in Bordeaux is centered on her mother, Sophie.  Sophie’s descriptions of their ramblings in the cultivated gardens of friends’ country estates suggest a  lost paradise perpetually regretted.  Despite their poverty, Sophie attempted to raise her first child as she herself had been raised.  She would sit with Rosa in the evenings, often singing to her at the piano.  She kept afternoons for their work with the alphabet and constantly sought to stimulate the child’s artistic faculties.

I was allowed to run about everywhere, and I have kept the sweetest recollection of that happy time of freedom.”  I covered the white walls with my shapeless sketches as high as I could reach and enjoyed myself cutting paper models.

I had for the stables a more irresistible taste than ever a courtesan for the royal antechambers.

Rosa  Bonheur,  a Life and a Legend by Dore Ashton and Denise Browne Hare. 

View all her paintings.