Rosa Bonheur, Plowing in the Nivernais (or The First Dressing), 1849, oil on canvas (Musée d’Orsay, Paris)
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Dr. Beth Harris: [0:05] We’re in the Musée d’Orsay, and we’re looking at Rosa Bonheur’s light-filled painting called “Plowing Nivernais.”
Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:15] That refers to both the region and the kind of oxen that are the stars of this canvas.
Dr. Harris: [0:21] They are. The human figure that pushes them along is hardly important.
Dr. Zucker: [0:26] So, Rosa Bonheur did some extraordinary things. She was an incredibly precocious girl. I think it was at age 14 she was actually sketching in the Louvre and actually creating oil paintings. This was possible because her father was an artist and had really encouraged her. I think they were very liberal.
Dr. Harris: [0:41] Otherwise, she likely would not have had her enormous artistic talent encouraged. She might not have ended up a painter at all.
Dr. Zucker: [0:49] This was made in 1849, which is just one year after the revolution, and it’s so interesting that an artist now is moving out into the countryside, away from all of the chaos of the city.
Dr. Harris: [1:00] Where the revolution happened.
Dr. Zucker: [1:01] We have this incredible image of these oxen turning the soil in the fall, to prepare it for the following year’s season. Look at the soil itself, you almost get a sense that here is the strength of France.
Dr. Harris: [1:14] The earth looks incredibly rich and fertile, so there is a sense of a kind of nationalistic idea of the French countryside, and that France will survive, and indeed thrive.
Dr. Zucker: [1:27] Those oxen are so powerful and so beautiful, and in a sense, so eternal. This is a ritual that has gone on long before the politics of the modern world…
Dr. Harris: [1:36] And will continue long after. They come forward in a receding diagonal that moves into our space. We have this sense of depth and atmospheric perspective and sense of weather, and the warmth of the sunlight. It’s really so particularly and carefully observed.
[1:54] It reminds me of so much that we see in the 1840s and then into the 1850s of this interest in rural life, of laborers, of the virtues of the countryside.
Dr. Zucker: [2:06] When I look at this, the oxen, those backs are so beautifully aligned, they almost create their own horizon, like the hills beside them. In a sense, they are the earth itself. There is the sense of permanence. Throughout the 1840s, especially with the kind of industrialization and the growth of the cities that’s taking place, there is this real desire to return to this much more basic truth.
Dr. Harris: [2:31] Which resides in nature and the countryside…
Dr. Zucker: [2:34] And in labor itself, but a kind of simple, very direct kind of labor.
Dr. Harris: [2:39] So do you think Rosa Bonheur is giving us a conservative vision at this moment, just after a very radical revolution of 1848 that brings the working class into power in a significant way?
Dr. Zucker: [2:51] I think that there are conservative aspects here, but it’s more complicated than that. She’s breaking too many boundaries. She is emphasizing the importance of landscape, of animal painting itself, on a scale that is often reserved for history painting.
[3:06] She is a woman, not painting interiors, not painting as an amateur, but is painting at the level of the highest professional. These are radical ideas, and I don’t think we can see this as conservative painting.
Dr. Harris: [3:16] And really remarkable accomplishments.
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