Biography books

Art Is a Tyrant by Catherine Hewitt review – the radical life of Rosa Bonheur

A sympathetic portrait of a lesbian cross-dressing animal painter resonates with our non-binary times

Rosa Bonheur was a 19th-century animalier, or animal painter, who liked her subjects to make their own way to her studio. Over the long decades of her career she summoned everything from mouflon (small sheep with wicked horns) to mustangs (she developed a late-life crush on Buffalo Bill) to a pair of lion cubs, which followed her around like house cats. On one occasion three polar bears turned up and politely posed on command.

All this provokes mild distaste now, of course, but still there can be no doubting Bonheur’s loving attention towards the animals that didn’t simply make her fortune and occasionally supply her dinner table, but also propelled her to the highest prizes, including the Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur. From her earliest days in a cramped Bordeaux apartment she gathered about her a small menagerie, including a sheep that she exercised in the local park, and she trained herself to look beyond the fluff and the feathers to the bony facts beneath. Later, moving to Paris, she got permission to sketch regularly in one of the city’s abattoirs. The result was an art in which animals really look like animals rather than soft toys or metaphors. You can virtually smell their reek coming off the canvas.

Take one of Bonheur’s early masterpieces, Ploughing in the Nivernais (1849), which shows two teams of oxen turning the soil during an early autumn afternoon. The animals are monumental, yet each sinew and muscle strains with the precision of a diagram from a biology textbook. The entire scene is bathed in the lemony light that one associates with Dutch art of the 17th century, especially with the work of Bonheur’s favourite animalier, Paulus Potter. It all adds up to a kind of detailed realism shot through with a delicate romanticism that never degenerates into anthropomorphic mush. Bonheur’s oxen are a crucial beat away from Edwin Landseer’s noble St Bernards digging travellers out of snow or his stags that always look as if they would be comfortable wearing a tartan tam o’shanter.

Nonetheless, it’s impossible not to wonder whether Bonheur’s close rendering of Burgundian soil and peasant sweat (you can just make out a couple of farmhands in the background) isn’t as vexing in its own way as anything Landseer ever produced. Just the previous year, Paris had descended into a bloody revolution as Louis Napoleon led a coup against the bourgeois “citizen king”, Louis Philippe. There had been deaths in the street, yet here in Bonheur’s painting farm animals continued to go about their timeless, cyclical business, indifferent as to whether France was ruled by a king, a president or an emperor. Hardly a surprise, then, that her work became hugely popular with the crowned – and de-crowned – heads of Europe and the class of people who depended on them. Empress Eugenie, who would be run out of France after the humiliating Prussian defeat of 1870, couldn’t get enough of Bonheur’s majestic celebrations of the natural order. The emerging bourgeoisie, meanwhile, loved the way that she ascribed to her animals something that felt like a work ethic and a sense of moral responsibility.

But not everyone felt so charmed, and it is one of this book’s odder swerves that Catherine Hewitt avoids exploring how sharply Bonheur’s work fell out of critical favour in her homeland from as early as the 1860s. In the new photographic age, painters turned their increasingly subjective gaze to the here and now of urban and suburban experience, leaving Bonheur’s pin-sharp rendering of a stallion’s flank seeming a slightly pointless exercise. Then the fact that Bonheur and her uber-agent Ernest Gambart tirelessly exploited the lucrative engraving and print market only added to a sense that she was less an original artist than a manufacturer of nostalgic imagery aimed firmly at the export markets of Britain and the US.

Hewitt moves swiftly over this, and instead searches for radical credentials in Bonheur’s domestic life. Having secured a carnet from the Paris police that allowed her to wear trousers (so much more practical for an artist than a cumbersome crinoline), Bonheur spent much of her life cross-dressing. Indeed, this became so much a part of her persona that, on one visit to her studio, Empress Eugénie’s eight-year-old son declared himself positively disappointed to find Mlle Bonheur wearing a dress. In addition, she drank, smoked and lived in succession with two wives, both of whom surrendered their lesser artistic careers to service hers.

Such an apparently non‑binary performance is a gift to the biographer, who is always under pressure to illustrate the contemporary resonance of her subject. But Hewitt never really pushes further into the muddling contradictions of Bonheur’s life and times. Here was a cross-dressing lesbian who liked to opine that other women should stick to frocks and an animal painter who insisted on the dignity of her dumb subjects while simultaneously making a fortune out of them. Not all of which is quite apparent from this diligently researched, beautifully produced and insistently sympathetic biography.

• Art Is a Tyrant by Catherine Hewitt is published by Icon (RRP £20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.