Rosa Bonheur Picture Study

Rosa Bonheur Picture Study Aid

My whole life has been devoted to improving my work and keeping alive the Creator’s spark in my soul. Each of us has a spark, and we’ve all got to account for what we do with it.

Rosa Bonheur

When I began taking my art history classes in college, I had never heard of Rosa Bonheur. This is not uncommon. There were many artists to whom I was introduced in those darkened lecture halls that I may never have known about if I hadn’t switched my major to art history in my freshman year. And I am truly thankful for this!

All of my art history classes followed a similar format. The professor connected his or her laptop to an overheard projector via miscellaneous cords erupting from the lectern (these were the dark ages before Bluetooth), lowered the lights in the room (or asked a student to do it), and suddenly on the screen in front of us was a massive work of art from whatever time period we happened to be studying.

It was always a little exciting when it was time to switch to a new piece because we never knew what we were going to get. Sometimes it was something familiar that was covered in our initial survey classes. Sometimes it was something surprising, like another painting by a familiar artist that we had never seen before. And sometimes, it was something that caught your breath.

The Horse Fair caught my breath. One of the many signs of a skilled artist is their ability to capture movement. Movement is not easy. Sometimes it can seem a little stiff and disjointed; a foot or shoulder is at an odd angle, and you can’t quite figure out how that person or animal is really supposed to be moving.

Good artists do it well, but the best artists make it seem as if the painting really is moving before your eyes. And that’s what Rosa Bonheur did in The Horse Fair. There is prancing. There is jumping. There is neighing. There is yelling. There is wind. There are rumbles in the ground from hoofs. There is so much movement, and it’s all wrapped up in one monumental swirl of paint.

Bonheur dedicated her life to painting, and not only the art of painting, but more specifically, the art of painting animals. She adored animals, and this is evident in the care and attention to detail she used when putting them on canvas. At a time when wild animal ownership was accepted, she kept a menagerie at her home and spent her days interacting with and painting the animals in her care. She studied their musculature, organs, and body structure the same way Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo studied humans. Painting was most certainly a passion for her, but animals were unquestionably just as important.

The intention of this Rosa Bonheur Picture Study Aid is to equip the home educator with some basic facts and understanding of a sampling of the artist’s work. It is not meant to be an exhaustive analysis or study of each piece or a complete biography of the artist.

About picture study, Ms. Mason recommended keeping learning as simple as possible, especially in the younger years, and put extra emphasis on the images by themselves.

There is no talk about schools of painting, little about style; consideration of these matters comes in later life, the first and most important thing is to know the pictures themselves. As in a worthy book we leave the author to tell his own tale, so do we trust a picture to tell its tale through the medium the artist gave it. In the region of art as else-where we shut out the middleman. (vol 6 pg 216)

Definite teaching is out of the question; suitable ideas are easily given, and a thoughtful love of Art inspired by simple natural talk over the picture at which the child is looking. (PR Article “Picture Talks”)

…we begin now to understand that art is not to be approached by such an acadamised road. It is of the spirit, and in ways of the spirit must we make our attempt. We recognise that the power of appreciating art and of producing to some extent an interpretation of what one sees is as universal as intelligence, imagination, nay, speech, the power of producing words. But there must be knowledge and, in the first place, not the technical knowledge of how to produce, but some reverent knowledge of what has been produced; that is, children should learn pictures, line by line, group by group, by reading, not books, but pictures themselves. A friendly picture-dealer supplies us with half a dozen beautiful little reproductions of the work of some single artist, term by term. After a short story of the artist’s life and a few sympathetic words about his trees or his skies, his river-paths or his figures, the little pictures are studied one at a time; that is, children learn, not merely to see a picture but to look at it, taking in every detail.” (vol 6 pg 214)

Picture Study Aids are meant to offer basic information about the artists as well as ready answers should your student ask about a particular aspect of a piece and the explanation isn’t readily evident. Ms. Mason emphasized not focusing on strict academic discourse when doing picture study, but rather simply exposing students to the art itself:

His education should furnish him with whole galleries of mental pictures, pictures by great artists old and new;––…––in fact, every child should leave school with at least a couple of hundred pictures by great masters hanging permanently in the halls of his imagination, to say nothing of great buildings, sculpture, beauty of form and colour in things he sees. Perhaps we might secure at least a hundred lovely landscapes too,––sunsets, cloudscapes, starlight nights. At any rate he should go forth well furnished because imagination has the property of magical expansion, the more it holds the more it will hold. (vol 6 pg 43)