Shorter Notice Like Father, Like Daughter: A Sketchbook Shared by Raymond and Rosa Bonheur, Rediscovered

In early June 1900, a two-week-long auction was coming to a close at the Galerie Georges Petit but still drawing crowds—everyone in Paris wanted to see the art hitherto cached in the studio of Rosa Bonheur (1822–99).¹ The painter had risen to great prominence in France, England, and the United States with The Horse Fair (1853–55) and filled her home and studio, the Château de By, with a menagerie of animals that rivaled the zoo at the Jardin des Plantes. The most successful woman artist of the century by any measure, she had also expressly forbidden such a public and large-scale sale.² But shortly after Bonheur’s death in May 1899, the inheritor of her estate, German-American painter Anna Klumpke (1856–1942), caved to mounting legal pressure and enlisted dealers Tedesco Frères to offer some two thousand paintings, works on paper, and sculpture for sale to the public.³ Deprived of opportunities to see Bonheur’s work in France for nearly fifty years, Parisians flocked to the gallery for the chance to view, at last, the unseen oeuvre of the chevalier turned officier of the Legion of Honor.⁴ On Thursday, 7 June, or Friday, 8 June, an assortment of sketchbooks went under the hammer.

There were sixteen in all, of varying sizes and origins. According to the detailed auction catalog, whose essays and lot notes were published in French and English, some were curated volumes preserving selections of Bonheur’s sketches from multiple decades. Others were carnets with dedicated subjects, such as lot 1842, featuring lions. Most bore the decorated artist’s monogram, but some carried that of her lifelong partner Jeanne-Nathalie Micas (1824–89).⁵ One of the last sold was lot 1847, a “small notebook covered with green corrugated paper, gilt-edged,” measuring 9.5 by 12.5 centimeters.⁶ The catalog provided the additional information:

Sixty-eight pages of sketches. This notebook which belonged to Raymond Bonheur, the father of Rosa, and which contains with [sic] autographic notes, pen drawings by him, was also used by Rosa; the sketches by her therein are numerous. The father owned the book when he lived rue Rumfort [sic]; several drawings by Rosa are probably of 1844.⁷

The dual authorship of this object has been lost in recent history. Since its acquisition by the Getty Research Institute (GRI), it has been mistakenly attributed to Rosa Bonheur alone and dated as its lot number from the 1900 sale (fig. 1). One of four known sketchbooks shared by the artist and her father, Raymond Bonheur (1796–1849), and the only of this kind in a public collection, the volume is a unique material document of their working relationship.⁸ A painter of modest renown, Raymond nurtured his eldest child’s precocious talent and raised with a similar artistic ethos her siblings Auguste (1824–84), Isidore (1827–1901), and Juliette (1830–91), each of whom became artists in their own right. Restoring the sketchbook’s dual authorship not only sheds new light on the artistic rapport of father and daughter but also provides context for the beginnings of Rosa’s great Salon successes The Horse Fair and Haymaking in the Auvergne (1855).

A faint annotation in the final pages of the sketchbook—“J’appartiens à R. Bonheur” (I belong to R. Bonheur)—speaks to the volume’s dual authorship as well as the challenge of retracing its origins and use by both Rosa and Raymond Bonheur.⁹ Nevertheless, the Getty’s sketchbook may be definitively identified as lot 1847 from Rosa Bonheur’s estate sale. Its worn green cover with decorative edges and eighty-four interior pages containing dozens of notes and sketches in various media, mostly graphite and ink, correspond to the auction catalog’s description. While none of the drawings or notes is signed, some evince multiple hands on the same page, such as the two markedly different scripts juxtaposed on leaf 5r (fig. 2). The sticker affixed to the front cover carries the lot number “1 • 847,” whose inscription, “Rosa Bonheur, acheté à sa vente après décès” (Rosa Bonheur, bought at her posthumous sale), suggests that it may have remained initially in France after the sale in 1900.

Little is known about the sketchbook’s provenance in the early twentieth century or the circumstances that led to the loss of its joint attribution. Retracing a timeline of its early history, however, illuminates the nature of this object, its use by the Bonheurs, and its significance to Rosa’s oeuvre. It seems likely that the carnet was purchased by Raymond before 1841—possibly as early as 1835—and that it was used into the 1850s. A seal on the verso of the front free endpaper indicates that it was produced by the book and stationery shop Chartier, which operated at 117, rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, the address partially legible at the stamp’s lower edge, from 1835 through the early 1840s.¹⁰ Corroborating this dating, the address “rue rumford 13,” annotated below “I belong to R. Bonheur,” became the family’s residence in 1841.¹¹ A different inscription, in Rosa’s distinctive hand, points to the sketchbook’s use into the 1850s: the name and address of critic and writer Arsène Houssaye (1815–96), who in 1856 became inspector general for the fine arts.¹² It is possible that the address’s notation coincided with his new appointment to oversee the École de Dessin pour les Jeunes Filles, which Raymond, and later Rosa, directed.

Establishing that this object was in use for a period of more than ten years creates a framework within which to consider its contents, both materially and iconographically. Drawings, studies, and day-to-day notes are distributed throughout. The bulk of blank pages fall in the middle, and the orientation of entries on the leaves from the second half are often inverted. The drawings are in varying stages of completion and detail in ink, pencil, or watercolor. On the basis of style, subject, or medium, some drawings may be identified as the work of father or daughter. Taken together, the pages reflect two artists at work simultaneously, unlike the other notebooks that Rosa and Raymond Bonheur were known to have shared, which also appeared at auction in 1900.

Rosa’s father emerges as the best candidate for the ink-and-wash compositions in the sketchbook, as suggested by the lot description in the auction catalog. Given the date of the object’s manufacture, Raymond was most likely its first owner. The inscription of its belonging to R. Bonheur and the accompanying address suggest that leaf 83r was Raymond’s starting point, further supported by the detailed landscapes in sepia ink and wash that appear only in the second half of the sketchbook, of which his composition depicting the chiseled face of a mountain below a band of tall clouds on leaf 81v is representative (fig. 3). The foreground, a short incline bordered at the left by trees and moss, creates the perch for this view. Although he was the father and teacher of a peintre animalière (animal painter), Raymond made his career with such vistas. The construction of this landscape sketch is similar to that of his painting Romantic Landscape (1834), now in the collection of the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux, reinforcing the identification of Raymond as its author. In one of the other shared sketchbooks sold at Rosa’s estate sale, lot 1841, the sepia drawings were exclusively attributed to Raymond. The catalog proposed that this album bearing the equivocal monogram “RB” had originated as a gift for Raymond, as it contained many sketches that the catalog dated to the late 1820s and attributed to the Bonheur patriarch.¹³

Raymond’s predilection for heightening pencil drawings with ink recurs in a sketch on leaf 80v—a portrait of a child greatly resembling Rosa (fig. 4). Crowned by short curls and framed by a delicate lace collar, the child’s rounded, youthful face turns downward. The fullness of her face recalls Raymond’s portrait of Rosa as a young girl with her brother Auguste (fig. 5), more so than that of a grown Rosa painted by Auguste years later and exhibited at the Salon in 1848 (fig. 6).¹⁴ The figure in the sketchbook portrait crouches, her left arm balanced on her knee, and outstretches her right palm, as though to feed a small, unpictured animal. The mountainscape and Rosa’s cameo support the assertion that this was originally Raymond’s sketchbook, possibly one that he intended to use for drawings in this medium, and also suggest that the volume predates the family’s relocation to rue Rumford in 1841, when Rosa was nineteen years old.

If these pages may be attributed to Raymond on the basis of their style, content, and media, then what is considered today the first half of the sketchbook—filled with drawings in pencil and watercolor and rendered in the opposite orientation—seems to belong to Rosa. The first notable composition, a double portrait, supports this premise (fig. 7). Dressed in a bodice and skirt and seated on the ground, the woman at the left steadies a paint or watercolor box with an open lid between her knees. Her right hand holds a brush pointed toward the canvas or notebook page that would be fitted into such a lid’s interior frame. The figure to her side seems to look on or out to the draftsperson. Two women central to Rosa’s life, Jeanne-Nathalie Micas and her mother, Henriette Micas (née Divalon), are likely the subjects in the depiction. Jeanne-Nathalie, Rosa’s childhood friend who would become her partner of fifty years, was also an artist and is said to have assisted Rosa in the studio on occasion.¹⁵ She also served as a frequent subject for Bonheur: the profile of the seated figure at left bears a strong resemblance to the portrait of Jeanne-Nathalie made by Rosa around 1850, now in the Musée National de Fontainebleau, and to more detailed profiles filling a nearby page of the sketchbook.¹⁶ The Micas matriarch, as the probable contender for the other seated figure, was a forceful presence in their lives; as Rosa’s adopted mother, she resided at Jeanne-Nathalie and Bonheur’s home, the Château de By, from 1860 until her death in 1875.¹⁷

This impromptu portrait could have been made by Rosa as she completed other studies in watercolor in plein air, such as the detailed rendering of a bird on a subsequent page of the sketchbook (fig. 8). The subject required a dozen different colors, each of which is carefully annotated in pencil. The scrupulous notes in Rosa’s handwriting disclose a young artist learning to capture the natural world on a two-dimensional surface or familiarizing herself with the many shades of the medium. Numerous drawings after other works of art, which a young Rosa would have made in the Musée du Louvre or elsewhere, similarly capture the hand of an artist in training. On other pages, she produced pencil sketches of a decorative vase with figures in relief, and a standing Egyptian statuary.¹⁸

The GRI sketchbook represents a working, functional object, one that father and daughter could have exchanged, examined, and discussed in their familial studio, distinct from the other three shared notebooks sold at auction in 1900. The auction catalog’s notes provide ample information that point to the other three volumes having been assembled, rather than used, by either Raymond or Rosa.¹⁹ The first to appear in the sale, lot 1839, contains nearly sixty sketches by Raymond, some predating his daughter’s birth, as well as drawings by Rosa made in the Louvre, likely from the last years of the 1830s, based on her surviving copyist registration.²⁰ The second, lot 1840, bore Rosa’s baptismal name, “Rosalie,” on the cover and comprised an assortment of thirty of her drawings, apparently randomly chosen, in addition to a few sepias and sketches by Raymond from the 1830s to 1840s.²¹ Lot 1841, a “very curious album,” was thought to have been “offered as a gift to Raymond Bonheur” yet appeared to include “several very old sketches by him.”²² The only other Rosa Bonheur sketchbook currently in a public collection in the United States, lot 1836 from the auction of 1900, contains no drawings from Rosa’s father; rather, it functioned as a curated repository for drawings by Rosa alone.²³ The sketchbook in the GRI’s collection is therefore the only extant material document of Rosa’s artistic relationship with her father.

As the only one of its kind in a public collection, and one with connections to both artists’ Salon works, the GRI sketchbook is also important for its drawings that relate to Rosa Bonheur’s The Horse Fair and Haymaking in the Auvergne. The drawings for her two great successes on the preeminent Parisian stage, made apparently from life, take on new meaning juxtaposed with her father’s work. Raymond actively encouraged Rosa, from her first days of artistic training, to surpass the achievements of other women artists, particularly Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755–1842).²⁴ In the wake of Raymond’s death, Rosa began two new monumental compositions that would fulfill her father’s charge. The Horse Fair and Haymaking in the Auvergne represented a culmination of years of study and active self-promotion. In December 1851 or January 1852, Rosa met with Charles de Morny (1811–65), head of the Ministry of the Interior and by extension all fine arts commissions.²⁵ The French state wished to confer upon Rosa the honor of a new commission, and de Morny was to determine a suitable subject. Rosa, who had been contemplating a composition featuring horses since 1844, proposed an equine project.²⁶ Unconvinced of her ability, the minister dismissed the idea. Together they agreed instead that the official commission would be for a painting depicting haymaking, but, at Rosa’s own request, the painter would defer the order and complete the horse picture first.²⁷ The Horse Fair catapulted Bonheur to new heights in 1853; Haymaking in the Auvergne cemented her mark on the French school at the Exposition Universelle in 1855.

A number of drawings provide compelling evidence that these two paintings began, at least in part, in the sketchbook shared with her father. Some drawings in the first fifty leaves suggest that Rosa’s planning for this composition may have started during Raymond’s lifetime, which would support her biography’s mythologizing narrative that The Horse Fair had been an idea since the early 1840s. Two notable studies of horses illustrate the subject’s early evolution as a composition inspired by the Louvre’s Old Masters and the Parthenon’s frieze.²⁸ The first graces the pages amid the pencil sketches that Rosa would have made in the Louvre in the late 1830s; it is drawn directly from a work by one of the artists she recalled admiring most: Landscape with a White Horse (ca. 1650–1700) by Dirck van Bergen.²⁹ In Rosa’s rendering, the animal’s hindquarters are rendered with short, emphatic strokes that stress its pronounced musculature. Her horse assumes the exact stance of Van Bergen’s primary subject, down to the exaggerated hip at the left. Leaf 43v offers a concrete connection to one of the earliest preparatory designs for The Horse Fair, now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (figs. 9, 10). In the sketchbook, two geometric outlines of horses and a partial third gallop across the page; a similar rudimentary profile of a horse appears along the lower edge of the drawing at the Metropolitan Museum. Whereas the studies are freely arranged on the sketchbook page, two distinct compositions are framed on the Metropolitan Museum’s sheet. That at the left side is framed by a horizontal line below and vertical line at right and includes many elements that would feature in the final Salon submission. On the same page, at right, is a sketch of four grouped animals, likely after Théodore Géricault’s Five Horses Viewed from behind (1822), which Rosa would have seen at the Louvre. The sketchbook page and the preparatory drawing link Rosa’s studies in the museum to the composition’s origins, responding to her father’s hope that she would ascend to the French painterly pantheon that was the Louvre.

To complete The Horse Fair, Rosa ultimately favored studies from life. A carefully rendered head of a horse on leaf 42r corresponds to the final stage of its compositional development. In the final months of the painting’s preparation and execution, Bonheur ventured to the horse market on the boulevard de l’Hôpital in men’s attire to study her primary subjects.³⁰ Rosa’s pencil carefully shaded the horse’s muzzle, forehead, and eyes, stopping short of its neck, crest, and mane. The circumstances under which Bonheur made such studies have since become historiographic fodder, but her commitment to working after nature as the foundation of her practice placed the artist in the company of numerous nineteenth-century contemporaries from the Barbizon school and the Impressionist circle.

Given the shared origin story for her major Salon submissions in the early 1850s, it is hardly surprising that studies for Haymaking in the Auvergne also appear in the sketchbook. Outnumbering those related to The Horse Fair, the drawings present the work’s evolution from single figures to fully choreographed scene. Women balancing bundles atop their heads, men carrying scythes, and figures using pitchforks to load hay onto the cart populate a half dozen leaves.³¹ Many of these figures were ultimately relegated to the wings of the painting that Bonheur exhibited in 1855, allowing the oxen and cart to take center stage. Drawings of heaps of hay and their transport attest to a methodical exhaustion of various compositional possibilities. For example, a drawing on leaf 48v frames the profiles of two horses pulling a cart and its contents against a haystack and hill beyond, grounding the scene in a specific landscape. A sketch on leaf 49v, meanwhile, focuses on the cart and the individuals tending to its load of hay, whose massive scale is emphasized in relation to the laboring animals and farmers. A leaf preceding these pages shows a horse in three-quarter view, whose figure is dwarfed by the haystack that exceeds the page’s margins (fig. 11). Meticulous attention to perspective and position is given to a series of studies of cradle scythes on leaves 37r through 39r (fig. 12). With the precision of technical drawing, the artist suspends the haymaker’s implement in space to capture its construction in three dimensions, rotating the tool to produce a schematic of every bolt and pin that joins the blades to the wooden handle.³² In contrast to the drawings related to The Horse Fair, the range of preparatory work for Haymaking represents an exclusive allegiance to working after life.

The placement of these studies in an old, used sketchbook purchased over a decade before, rather than in a new volume of fresh pages, suggests that Rosa treated the development of Haymaking as an extension of her father’s own practice, literally and figuratively. Leaves 48v and 49v are drawn in the same page orientation as Raymond’s landscape studies in the second half of the album. Rosa’s sketches for Haymaking, along with the drawings for The Horse Fair, also fall between the successions of blank pages in the middle of the object. Just as the final works reflected Rosa’s bids to continue the familial artistic lineage, the early drawings for them were executed in the sketchbook in such a way that they seem to continue Raymond’s contributions.

Ultimately, both paintings cemented Rosa’s position in the art world. The Horse Fair heralded a lasting success in England and the United States, thanks in part to its purchaser, Belgian-born, London-based dealer Ernest Gambart (1814–1902), who exhibited it widely in both countries. The sale of the massive canvas brought Bonheur financial and artistic independence, a feat rare among her male peers and unprecedented among her fellow women artists. Haymaking similarly confirmed her place as the foremost animal painter on the international stage of the Exposition Universelle. Thanks to these two paintings, which continued the momentum set by her first state commission, Ploughing in the Nivernais (1849), Bonheur enjoyed numerous accolades in the latter half of the nineteenth century.³³ The appearances of The Horse Fair and Haymaking in the Auvergne in the sketchbook that she shared with her father offer a belated realization of Raymond’s wish that she establish independent renown and secure an artistic legacy for them both.

The sketchbook linking Rosa’s two works attests to the artistic proximity between father and daughter at the end of Raymond’s life during what were arguably the most important years of Rosa’s career. Its jointly authored pages complicate enduring narratives of artistic inheritance and Rosa’s own lore, which she sought to perpetuate in her final years and posthumously through Klumpke. Father and daughter emerge as creative confidantes, whose relationship foregrounded Rosa’s success and renown. As the only shared album known to have survived, the restored dual attribution of the sketchbook opens new lines of inquiry for the study of Raymond’s and Rosa’s respective oeuvres, particularly her works The Horse Fair and Haymaking in the Auvergne. The identification and recontextualization of their shared undertaking show how the first thoughts for some of Rosa’s best-known works were drafted on the pages of a sketchbook, side by side.

Alexandra Morrison holds a PhD in history of art from Yale University and is a curatorial associate in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Notes

I thank Naina Saligram for her insightful reading and intellectual generosity. Unless otherwise noted, translations are mine.

1. The sale at Galerie Georges Petit began Wednesday, 30 May 1900, and ended Friday, 8 June 1900. See Léon Roger-Milès, Atelier Rosa Bonheur, 2 vols. (Paris: Georges Petit, 1900). For contemporary press coverage of the sale, see La Rivaudière, “Notes d’un curieux: Les aquarelles et les dessins de Rosa Bonheur,” Le Gaulois, 3 June 1900, 3; and “Vente de l’atelier Rosa Bonheur,” Le Radical, 3 June 1900, 2. ↩︎

2. Bonheur’s estate planning was the primary subject of one of her biography’s final chapters. Bonheur told the sole inheritor of her estate, Anna Klumpke, not to organize a public sale; she advised selling a study if money was scarce. Anna Klumpke, Rosa Bonheur: Sa vie, son oeuvre (Paris: Flammarion, 1908), 394. ↩︎

3. Dealer Giacomo Tedesco (1799–1870) had represented Bonheur since the late 1840s. The patriarch left his business to his sons, who rechristened the enterprise Tedesco Frères in the 1870s. See Paul de Katow, “Rosa Bonheur,” Gil blas, 27 March 1883, 3; and Paolo Serafini, “Archives for the History of the French Art Market (1860–1920): The Dealers’ Network,” Getty Research Journal, no. 8 (2016): 114, 130nn13–14. Tedesco Frères had initially offered to buy the contents of Bonheur’s studio for one million francs, but public auction proved the most amenable solution. For the history of the sale’s organization, see Klumpke, Rosa Bonheur, 405–12. ↩︎

4. Bonheur was the first woman artist to receive the French Legion of Honor, a distinction that was awarded by Empress Eugénie herself in 1865. In 1893, following success at the Universal Exposition in Chicago, Bonheur was promoted to the rank of officer. A complete list of Bonheur’s distinctions appears in Klumpke, Rosa Bonheur, 300n3. ↩︎

5. The descriptions for lots 1837 and 1838, for example, identify Micas as the sole author of those sketchbooks’ contents. Léon Roger-Milès, Atelier Rosa Bonheur, vol. 2, Aquarelles et dessins (Paris: Galerie Georges Petit, 1900), 176. ↩︎

6. Roger-Milès, Atelier Rosa Bonheur, 2:79. ↩︎

7. Roger-Milès, Atelier Rosa Bonheur, 2:79. Rosa Bonheur sketchbook, Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute (GRI), 850837, hereafter cited as Bonheur sketchbook. The sketchbook is fully digitized and available at http://hdl.handle.net/10020/850837f5. The sketchbook was acquired from the McAlpine Collection through the dealer Kenneth W. Rendell in Newton, Massachusetts, in 1985. ↩︎

8. The other three sketchbooks shared by Raymond and Rosa appeared as lots 1839, 1840, and 1841. Roger-Milès, Atelier Rosa Bonheur 2:177–78. Their current locations are unknown. ↩︎

9. Bonheur sketchbook, back free endpaper, recto. ↩︎

10. Sébastien Bottin’s Almanach du commerce from 1833 records at this address as a joint enterprise, “Meslin & Chartier.” By 1835, however, Meslin disappears; A. Cambon’s Almanach des commerçans de Paris from that same year names only Chartier. One business directory continues to place Chartier at 117, rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré through at least 1847, but Didot’s Annuaire states that another paper shop named Brunet was operating at this location starting in 1844. Regardless, by 1854, Chartier had moved to 105, rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Sébastien Bottin, Almanach du commerce de Paris, de la France et des pays étrangers (Paris: Bureau de l’Almanach du Commerce, 1833), 220; A. Cambon, Almanach des commerçans de Paris (Paris: Bureau de l’Almanach des Commerçans, 1835), 668, 713; Sébastien Bottin, Almanach-Bottin du commerce de Paris (Paris: Bureau de l’Almanach du Commerce, 1842), 267; E.-M. Prétot, Annuaire de la typographie parisienne et départementale (Paris: Pretot, 1847), 106; Firmin-Didot Frères, Annuaire général du commerce, de l’industrie, de la magistrature et de l’administration, ou Almanach des 500,000 adresses de Paris, des départements et des pays étrangers (Paris: Firmin-Didot Frères, 1844), 580; and Sébastien Bottin, Almanach-Bottin du commerce de Paris (Paris: Bureau de l’Almanach du Commerce, 1854), 942. ↩︎

11. Klumpke, Rosa Bonheur, 170. ↩︎

12. Bonheur sketchbook, 68v. Houssaye’s appointment was widely reported. See, for example, “Faits divers,” La presse, 31 January 1856, 2. ↩︎

13. Other drawings, however, postdate Raymond’s by at least two decades, according to the lot notes. Roger-Milès, Atelier Rosa Bonheur, 2:178. ↩︎

14. Explication des ouvrages de peinture, sculpture, architecture, gravure et lithographie des artistes vivants, exposés au Musée national du Louvre le 15 mars 1848 (Paris: Vinchon, 1848), 36, cat. no. 156. ↩︎

15. Klumpke, Rosa Bonheur, 178. ↩︎

16. Bonheur sketchbook, 4r. ↩︎

17. The sale of The Horse Fair in 1855 allowed Bonheur to purchase the Château de By in 1860. Located in the Parisian suburb of Thomery, the château comprised apartments for living as well as a studio and menagerie for her work. Klumpke, Rosa Bonheur, 243–45. ↩︎

18. Bonheur sketchbook, 2v, 3r, 7r. ↩︎

19. Despite the shared sketchbook’s unorthodox organization and perplexing use, there is no reason to doubt the accuracy of the auction catalog. Although French art critic Léon Roger-Milès is credited as the author of its introductory essay, realistically only Klumpke could have given such specific details about the sketchbooks and their provenance. By the last year of the artist’s life, Klumpke agreed, at the painter’s behest, to steward her estate and publish a definitive biography, which would appear in 1908. Whether in preparing this manuscript, which oscillates between Klumpke’s first-person narration and Bonheur’s own voice, or in determining which works to include in the artist’s bequest to the state, the pair had ample opportunity to discuss the sketchbooks and their contents in the late 1890s. For Klumpke’s own recollection of this period, see Klumpke, Rosa Bonheur, 101–26. See also Gretchen van Slyke, “Reinventing Matrimony: Rosa Bonheur, Her Mother, and Her Friends,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 19, nos. 3/4 (1991): 69–72. ↩︎

20. Roger-Milès, Atelier Rosa Bonheur 2:177. Rosa’s extant copyist registration dates to 9 August 1838. Paris, Archives nationales, Registre des copistes, Élèves (chrono) 1834–1840 (20150337/445, formerly LL06), folio 108. ↩︎

21. Roger-Milès, Atelier Rosa Bonheur 2:177. ↩︎

22. Roger-Milès, Atelier Rosa Bonheur 2:178. ↩︎

23. Roger-Milès, Atelier Rosa Bonheur 2:176. This sketchbook is in the collection of Transylvania University, J. Douglas Gay Jr./Frances Carrick Thomas Library Special Collections, Kentucky. ↩︎

24. Klumpke, Rosa Bonheur, 164. ↩︎

25. Klumpke, Rosa Bonheur, 223. ↩︎

26. Klumpke, Rosa Bonheur, 218. ↩︎

27. For a condensed history of the commission, see Klumpke, Rosa Bonheur, 223–28. ↩︎

28. Klumpke, Rosa Bonheur, 221. ↩︎

29. Bonheur sketchbook, 9r. Among the Old Masters who were “irresistibly fascinating” (“exerçaient . . . une fascination irrésistible”) to the young artist was Van Bergen. Klumpke, Rosa Bonheur, 165. For more information on Van Bergen’s White Horse in a Landscape, see the object page (inv. 1035) on the Louvre website, https://collections.louvre.fr/ark:/53355/cl010059279. ↩︎

30. Bonheur sketchbook, 42r. Bonheur’s masquerade was reported even before The Horse Fair appeared at the Salon in 1853. See Edmond Texier, “Les Peintres, les ateliers et les modèles,” Tableau de Paris, vol. 2 (Paris: Paulin et le Chevalier, 1853), 46–47. ↩︎

31. Bonheur sketchbook, 7v, 26v, 40r, 44r, 47r. ↩︎

32. Bonheur sketchbook, 38v, 39r. ↩︎

33. For one of the first announcements of her induction to the French Legion of Honor in the French press, see “Chronique,” La comédie, 18 May 1865, 8. The act of her induction was dated 8 June 1865. See J. Cohen, “La décoration de Rosa Bonheur,” La France (Paris), 12 June 1865, 1. The episode is recounted by Klumpke, Rosa Bonheur, 264. See also this essay, note 4. ↩︎