Art is a Tyrant: The Unconventional Life of Rosa Bonheur by Catherine Hewitt
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
As a fan of 19th-century animal painting, and horses, I instantly succumbed to the siren call of this hefty bio of one of the greats, French painter Rosa Bonheur. Her massive, dramatic canvas of The Horse Fair graces the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and was an international sensation. (I can’t resist pointing out that it sold at auction for an enormous sum to magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, who within days donated it to the Met because he felt such a work of art should be “permanently accessible to the public.” Imagine.)
She herself was a brave, self-assured perfectionist artist, who pooh-poohed “women’s rights…women’s nonsense,” believing that one’s work would be enough to succeed. She lived as she chose, with cropped hair, endless cigarettes, velvet trousers, a multifarious menagerie of horses, cattle, sheep, goats, dogs, lions, a tiger, mouflons…. Lucky Rosa. Eldest daughter of an artist father who nurtured and supported her talents (as well as those of her siblings), Rosa lived through a tumultuous period of French history, encompassing the revolutions of 1830, 1848, the Franco-Prussian War and its bloody aftermath, all on the cusp of the great artistic revolution that saw Impressionism and modern art creeping up on the more academic and romantic schools to which she belonged. Her first submissions to the huge annual Salon exhibition were accepted, and well-reviewed as charming, impressive, and who’d-think-a-woman-could-be-this-good? Her career was launched, and she spent the rest of her life drawing, sketching, studying, and painting the animals with which she surrounded herself while the household was run by her devoted companion of many years, Nathalie Micas.
And that’s pretty much the story as told by Catherine Hewitt. Rosa won awards, was given medals, visited by royalty, flitting among her estates outside Paris and Nice, plus the pied-a-terre in Paris. She was wealthy, much admired, famous, entertaining Buffalo Bill Cody and a lot of equally wealthy noble socialites. After a while, it starts to read like a People magazine bio. We are told over and over again how hard she worked at her painting, but we learn very little about the art itself. There are thirteen not-particularly-high-quality color photos of paintings in the book, and five of them are portraits of Rosa herself by others. The title is referenced only in an epigram at the front of the book, and very little in the book itself makes it sound as though Bonheur actually felt that her art was a “tyrant” – it was what she did, what she wanted to do, what she chose to devote herself to, and was the happiest in doing. I am generally in absolute favor of popular biography, in readable, warm-hearted books to excite and interest and engage readers in serious subjects, but Hewitt has opted for a rather breathless tone that detracts. She has a propensity to end chapters or segments with clumsy cliff-hangers: “…just a few weeks later, France was rocked by some devastating news,” “…just a few weeks later, something incredible happened,” “…there was a professional surprise in store – for Rosa was about to become front-page news across the world.” I started rolling my eyes. They kept rolling when Hewitt used odd verbs to presumably “punch up” quoted speech or writing: an art journal “arraigns” a critical comment; Rosa “effervesces” her pleased opinion of a visitor. And when Rosa and Nathalie spend some months traveling in France in their own, both in their late twenties, Hewitt repeatedly refers to them as “the girls.”
So, I learned a lot about Rosa Bonheur, which was nice. I also very much enjoyed the incident when a rich American approached her about illustrating a stud book he was developing for breeding Percheron horses in Illinois (where I live). The gentleman’s name was Dunham, and I realized that I myself had competed in horse shows on the estate owned by his family, which still houses equestrian facilities.
But overall, this starry-eyed, not-very-well-written volume is a 400+ page puff piece. For art history geeks only, and they may wish for something with a bit more meat (Bonheur apparently had few qualms about eating the animals she had been painting) to it.
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