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Lot Essay
Perhaps among the most important paintings by the renowned animalier Rosa Bonheur remaining in private hands, Le Roi de la forêt was considered by the artist herself to be one of her masterpieces. Depicting a life-sized stag in a misty wooded landscape, observed from life in the area around the artist’s château near Fontainebleau, the picture is a masterful example of the kind of exacting naturalism in the depiction of animals for which Bonheur is still so highly regarded. The work’s first owner was Bonheur’s great dealer Ernest Gambart, who acquired the work directly from the artist not long after its execution. Gambart hung Le Roi de la forêt in his private home in Nice after sending it for exhibition first in Antwerp and then in London, where he also had the work engraved. Gambart also lent the picture to the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 when Bonheur was asked if she might send some of her recent work. When the artist died suddenly in 1899, Gambart was instrumental in having a monument built in her honor in Fontainebleau (now destroyed, fig. 1). Depicted in bas-relief on the four sides of the pedestal were a portrait of Bonheur as well as her three most famous compositions – Le Marché aux chevaux, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Labourage Nivernais, now in the Musée d’Orsay, and Le Roi de la forêt.
Bonheur’s association with Gambart began when he purchased her famous Le Marché aux chevaux (1853-1855, Metropolitan Museum of Art, fig. 2), depicting the horse market held in Paris on the tree-lined boulevard de l'Hôpital, near the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, from her for the astonishing price of 40,000 francs. Gambart toured the mammoth painting to his gallery space on Pall Mall in London and then throughout the major cities of England and Scotland. Queen Victoria was so impressed by Bonheur's art that she sent the artist a letter expressing her admiration, and received Bonheur privately at Windsor Castle when she traveled to England. Gambart also had Le Marché aux chevaux engraved by Thomas Landseer, the brother of the painter Sir Edwin Landseer, who Rosa greatly admired and whose own iconic The Monarch of the Glen (1851, fig. 3) was an important inspiration for Le Roi de la forêt. This tour was the first of a series of tours of the artist's work that Gambart undertook to build interest in Rosa’s work among the English public. These tours and the sale of engravings after her best paintings made her one of the most popular artists in England during the 19th century. Following its enormous success in the United Kingdom, The Horse Fair went on tour to America, further establishing Bonheur’s international fame and recognition to a degree that few other artists of the time could boast. In France, Rosa was decorated with the Legion d' Honour by the Empress Eugénie and was later promoted to officer of the order, the first woman to receive such an honor.
Still regarded as one of the most important and well-known female artists, Rosa Bonheur was remarkable by the standards of almost any era. She was born in Bordeaux in 1822 and received her earliest artistic education from her father Raymond, a landscape painter, who encouraged her interest in art because of his adherence to Saint-Simonianism, which advocated for the equality of the sexes. Inspired by George Sand and with the permission of the French Government, Bonheur cut her hair short and began dressing in men’s clothing in an effort to blend in at the slaughterhouses and horse fairs she would visit to study animal anatomy and movement for her paintings where traditionally female clothing proved, in the artist’s words, ‘a total nuisance.’ Bonheur also studied animal anatomy and osteology by performing dissections of animals at the École nationale vétrinaire d'Alfort, the National Veterinary Institute in Paris. On these visits she prepared detailed studies which she would later use as references for her paintings and sculptures. Eventually, she kept a small menagerie of her own, which expanded significantly in 1860 when she relocated to the Château de By in Thoméry, a village on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau. There Bonheur was able to keep a variety of animals which served as the subjects of her paintings – among them cows, horses, sheep, boars, deer, lions, and also the stag which served as her model for the Le Roi de la forêt.
A devout Realist, Bonheur hoped to democratize art by presenting subjects that the general viewer could comprehend and appreciate, taking her subject matter from everyday life. As she grew older, Bonheur increasingly feared that the landscape and the lives of animals she so loved would be forever changed by the progress of modernity and the move away from pastoral life. Once she retreated to the Château de By, Bonheur devoted herself to the unrelenting study of painting these animals and landscapes. Her close and repeated studies of animals throughout her life enabled her to paint them with realistic presence and strength and exacting naturalism, but she also worked directly with the animals in her menagerie as her models, sometimes holding them in place through a rigging system so that she could paint in front of her model en plein air (fig. 4). Nature, Bonheur believed, was always true and beautiful.
The popularity of Rosa’s paintings waned somewhat during the mid-20th Century, when she came to be seen as a very competent painter with a great fidelity to nature but whose compositions lacked emotional tension and resonance. She was compared unfavorably to artists like Landseer who often made the relationship between man and the animals depicted the central narrative of his paintings. Le Roi de la forêt, however, rejects this simplistic reading of Rosa’s work and truly demonstrates the artist working at the height of her powers. In as much as the realism in the depiction of the stag is a tour-de-force, the picture is brought to life thorough the tension between the figure of the stag and the viewer. Staring directly out of the picture plane, the stag locks eyes with the viewer and the encounter between the two pulses with potential energy of a myriad of interpretations - a startled animal weighing the options of fight or flight, an encounter between hunter and prey, the intrusion of the world of man into the world of nature, or the hagiography of St. Hubertus. Le Roi de la forêt is a bravura masterpiece by one of history’s most accomplished female painters, and a true icon of 19th century European Art.
After leaving the Gambart collection following the acclaimed dealer's death, Le Roi de la forêt belonged to several important American collections as well, adding to its already distinguished provenance. The work made its way to the United States around the turn of the century when it was sold by Knoedler to the American steel magnate Charles M. Schwab. It was then in the collection of Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge, heir to part of the Rockefeller fortune by birth, and to the Remington Arms Company fortune by marriage. A famous animal lover, many of the works in her collection depicted animals, including a number of works by Bonheur, of which the present work was the crown jewel.
We are grateful to Annie-Paule Quinsac for confirming the authenticity of this painting.
(fig. 1) Monument de Rosa Bonheur, circa 1920. Fontainebleau.
(fig. 2) Rosa Bonheur, The Horse Fair, 1852-55. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
(fig. 3) Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, The Monarch of the Glen, © Christie's, 2016.
(fig. 4) Rosa Bonheur drawing a deer suspended by ropes to a tree.
Bonheur’s association with Gambart began when he purchased her famous Le Marché aux chevaux (1853-1855, Metropolitan Museum of Art, fig. 2), depicting the horse market held in Paris on the tree-lined boulevard de l'Hôpital, near the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, from her for the astonishing price of 40,000 francs. Gambart toured the mammoth painting to his gallery space on Pall Mall in London and then throughout the major cities of England and Scotland. Queen Victoria was so impressed by Bonheur's art that she sent the artist a letter expressing her admiration, and received Bonheur privately at Windsor Castle when she traveled to England. Gambart also had Le Marché aux chevaux engraved by Thomas Landseer, the brother of the painter Sir Edwin Landseer, who Rosa greatly admired and whose own iconic The Monarch of the Glen (1851, fig. 3) was an important inspiration for Le Roi de la forêt. This tour was the first of a series of tours of the artist's work that Gambart undertook to build interest in Rosa’s work among the English public. These tours and the sale of engravings after her best paintings made her one of the most popular artists in England during the 19th century. Following its enormous success in the United Kingdom, The Horse Fair went on tour to America, further establishing Bonheur’s international fame and recognition to a degree that few other artists of the time could boast. In France, Rosa was decorated with the Legion d' Honour by the Empress Eugénie and was later promoted to officer of the order, the first woman to receive such an honor.
Still regarded as one of the most important and well-known female artists, Rosa Bonheur was remarkable by the standards of almost any era. She was born in Bordeaux in 1822 and received her earliest artistic education from her father Raymond, a landscape painter, who encouraged her interest in art because of his adherence to Saint-Simonianism, which advocated for the equality of the sexes. Inspired by George Sand and with the permission of the French Government, Bonheur cut her hair short and began dressing in men’s clothing in an effort to blend in at the slaughterhouses and horse fairs she would visit to study animal anatomy and movement for her paintings where traditionally female clothing proved, in the artist’s words, ‘a total nuisance.’ Bonheur also studied animal anatomy and osteology by performing dissections of animals at the École nationale vétrinaire d'Alfort, the National Veterinary Institute in Paris. On these visits she prepared detailed studies which she would later use as references for her paintings and sculptures. Eventually, she kept a small menagerie of her own, which expanded significantly in 1860 when she relocated to the Château de By in Thoméry, a village on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau. There Bonheur was able to keep a variety of animals which served as the subjects of her paintings – among them cows, horses, sheep, boars, deer, lions, and also the stag which served as her model for the Le Roi de la forêt.
A devout Realist, Bonheur hoped to democratize art by presenting subjects that the general viewer could comprehend and appreciate, taking her subject matter from everyday life. As she grew older, Bonheur increasingly feared that the landscape and the lives of animals she so loved would be forever changed by the progress of modernity and the move away from pastoral life. Once she retreated to the Château de By, Bonheur devoted herself to the unrelenting study of painting these animals and landscapes. Her close and repeated studies of animals throughout her life enabled her to paint them with realistic presence and strength and exacting naturalism, but she also worked directly with the animals in her menagerie as her models, sometimes holding them in place through a rigging system so that she could paint in front of her model en plein air (fig. 4). Nature, Bonheur believed, was always true and beautiful.
The popularity of Rosa’s paintings waned somewhat during the mid-20th Century, when she came to be seen as a very competent painter with a great fidelity to nature but whose compositions lacked emotional tension and resonance. She was compared unfavorably to artists like Landseer who often made the relationship between man and the animals depicted the central narrative of his paintings. Le Roi de la forêt, however, rejects this simplistic reading of Rosa’s work and truly demonstrates the artist working at the height of her powers. In as much as the realism in the depiction of the stag is a tour-de-force, the picture is brought to life thorough the tension between the figure of the stag and the viewer. Staring directly out of the picture plane, the stag locks eyes with the viewer and the encounter between the two pulses with potential energy of a myriad of interpretations - a startled animal weighing the options of fight or flight, an encounter between hunter and prey, the intrusion of the world of man into the world of nature, or the hagiography of St. Hubertus. Le Roi de la forêt is a bravura masterpiece by one of history’s most accomplished female painters, and a true icon of 19th century European Art.
After leaving the Gambart collection following the acclaimed dealer's death, Le Roi de la forêt belonged to several important American collections as well, adding to its already distinguished provenance. The work made its way to the United States around the turn of the century when it was sold by Knoedler to the American steel magnate Charles M. Schwab. It was then in the collection of Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge, heir to part of the Rockefeller fortune by birth, and to the Remington Arms Company fortune by marriage. A famous animal lover, many of the works in her collection depicted animals, including a number of works by Bonheur, of which the present work was the crown jewel.
We are grateful to Annie-Paule Quinsac for confirming the authenticity of this painting.
(fig. 1) Monument de Rosa Bonheur, circa 1920. Fontainebleau.
(fig. 2) Rosa Bonheur, The Horse Fair, 1852-55. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
(fig. 3) Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, The Monarch of the Glen, © Christie's, 2016.
(fig. 4) Rosa Bonheur drawing a deer suspended by ropes to a tree.