Today, March 8th, on the occasion of the international day of women's rights, we wanted to honor a place which, because of the nonconformist personality who shaped it, by its history and by its atmosphere like no other, touched us particularly. We also wanted to emphasize an ambitious project of heritage rehabilitation carried out by women with communicative energy around an artist who was world famous and who has since unjustly fallen into oblivion, in France at least.
Introduced to painting by her father, the painter Raymond Bonheur, she showed exceptional predispositions at a very young age and made a living from her art at the age of In , she began to study animals, which would become her specialty, both in painting and sculpture. Barely 20 years old, she multiplies prizes and medals in the successive salons where she exhibits and gradually acquires an undeniable fame.
With her immense painting The Horse Market 2. Fiercely independent, refusing to marry in order not to submit to a man and not to harm her art, Rosa Bonheur sought all her life to prove by her actions and through her painting that a woman could free herself from the shackles of her time and exist by herself. It is with short hair and in pants of which she had obtained the right of use by the Prefecture of Paris the famous permit of disguise that she traversed forests and fairs with cattle to draw her models in all freedom.
Famous and adored, she rubbed shoulders with all the great names of her time: artists, writers, musicians, Queen Victoria, Napoleon III, Buffalo Bill whose portrait she painted She spent the last 40 years of her life there. The artist settled in this vast residence within a four-hectare property where she had a very large studio built by Jules Saulnier the architect of the Buissson Farm and the Menier Chocolate Factory and arranged spaces for her animals of 50 different species: horses, wild boars, bears, wolves, lions, monkeys, roam the immense park in freedom.
Rosa Bonheur is convinced that animals have a soul that she tries to render in her painting. After his death in May , the property reverted to his "adopted daughter" Anna Klumpke, a painter and herself the product of an astonishing sibling group of women ahead of their time: Anna's sisters were neurologists, astronomers and renowned musicians. The different generations of the Klumpke-Dejerine-Sorrel family successively opened and closed the studio until it was taken over by Katherine Brault in September Having fallen under the spell of the place and the exceptional career of the artist, Katherine Brault and her daughters have been working since to revive the house and the legacy of Rosa Bonheur, measuring every day how lucky they are to be in charge of such a place: an immensely famous artist's studio in its time that has never been modified.
