Rosa Bonheur, Sheep in the Highlands, 1857, oil on canvas, 46 x 65 cm (Wallace Collection, London)
The Wallace Collection suggests that this painting is likely the result of a trip that the artist made to Scotland the previous year.
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:09] We’re in the Wallace Collection, and we’re looking at a Rosa Bonheur. This is called “Sheep”. It’s on a wall with lots of other paintings, but we both noticed how it just really stands out.
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:16] It really does. The effect of real light in this landscape is remarkable. She was an animal painter, but the landscape is also really pretty fabulous.
Dr. Zucker: [0:27] And it’s a complicated landscape. You have rain in a couple of areas and light coming through. What I find so incredibly complex is the way that light plays on the fur of the sheep, as well as the brush and the grass in the foreground. It’s so complicated. It’s a sense of minute depth in a way.
Dr. Harris: [0:43] It almost, in some ways, reminds me of a Pre-Raphaelite painting in its attention to detail and actually observing nature instead of a kind of academic formula.
Dr. Zucker: [0:57] When you look at the paintings of women of the 19th century, we so often see domestic scenes, but here she is out in nature.
Dr. Harris: [0:00] It wasn’t easy for her to do that.
Dr. Zucker: [1:00] No, not at all. This is a relatively a pastoral scene, but nevertheless, her paintings really do show animals in a much more aggressive way.
Dr. Harris: [1:07] We know that Rosa Bonheur, obviously, it wasn’t easy for her as a woman to be a professional artist. In fact, in order to be out in the fields and painting animals, it was much more efficient and comfortable to wear pants, but she actually had to petition the French government…
Dr. Zucker: [0:00] That’s right. I remember that.
Dr. Harris: [1:32] …to wear pants. Like so many women who became successful artists, her family included male artists. That’s how she would have learned how to paint. Because of course women could not just simply go to art school.
Dr. Zucker: [1:33] It was accepted for women to dabble in painting. They certainly could take private lessons, but it was at the level of amateur. Rosa Bonheur has really transcended that and become a professional, which was an extremely rare and somewhat provocative thing to do.
Dr. Harris: [1:50] She had the support of her family. Her family was very progressive in that way, and really encouraged her. Her father was a painter. Her siblings were painters. Her mother encouraged her to draw.
Dr. Zucker: [2:00] If I remember correctly, she ended up being quite successful financially. She had a very strong reputation. Although, it was a narrow reputation, again, as an animal painter.
Dr. Harris: [2:11] When you see such a beautiful painting like this by a woman artist, it’s impossible not to think about all the women who didn’t have that support of their family, who could have become great painters and didn’t.
[0:00] [music]
