Living Bonheur in Paris

Learning landscapes

When I was 19 I took a course at U of T called “Women and Art in 19th Century France.” To find images of the far away oil paintings that we were studying in class I searched among the stacks at Robarts. Surrounded by too-small text, buried in the midst of encyclopedic entries, I found a tiny photograph of Rosa Bonheur’s masterpiece Ploughing in the Nivernais. I wrote a forgettable paper on that painting; the art itself was anything but. I remember sitting on the floor in the library holding the book of images on my lap, taking in the perfectly rendered oxen, muscles rippling, tilling the land. The animals take up more space on the canvas than the background farm hands who guide the beasts along.

Ploughing in the Nivernais: Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Memory is a strange animal. I’ve long forgotten my professor’s name, but I can remember the sunlight streaming in through the classroom windows as a woman who would have been younger than I am now taught us about French art and why it mattered to her. In that same class I remember reading Mauprat, a novel about love and education written by George Sand who influenced Bonheur. Both writer and painter were placemakers. Each in her own way an artist with eyes fixed on the land she loved, showing how it was shaped by what and who lived on it. Both women created and changed landscapes. 

Trained by her father to paint, Bonheur coaxed life into her subjects with brush strokes and a keen eye for detail. He encouraged her artistic independence all the more after the death of her mother. Bonheur grew into a solitary figure who preferred to wear pants and loose fitting tops when she went to the local horse fairs and slaughterhouses to study the musculature of the animals she painted. Like Sand, she had to get police authorization to wear men’s clothing in public. Sand’s rustic novels showcased the French countryside and its people, a subject matter that was mirrored in Bonheur’s art. The painting that so deeply affected me at 19, with its many shades of green and brown, a grey blue sky overhead, foregrounds the natural world. In fact, the three men walking along side the oxen are left without faces. In this field, as in any other field, to make something grow from nothing one needs only the seed of an idea and the strength to plough the land.

Six months after I finished that art class my then-husband and I travelled to Paris. We ate French pastries to sustain long walks along the Seine, moving from gallery to gallery. Once inside the Musee D’Orsay, fueled by buttery croissants and the seed of self-awareness, I suggested we split up and meet back in an hour. I never bothered to read the museum map, choosing instead to wander in and out of rooms, with only myself to consider. I never anticipated being stopped short by Bonheur’s bovine masterpiece. I had not known it was there! Call it body memory or a visceral response to something I did not have the language for - in that solitary space her cows made me cry. 

A few years later my husband and I parted ways. For years I was a solitary figure like Bonheur, studying the muscles and sinews of my life, trying to figure out how this landscape had come to be so shaped. I had a miniature replica of Bonheur’s canvas affixed to my fridge door, a magnetised memory of a place I hope to return to one day. Did Bonheur and Sand turn to each other for understanding, seeing through to what was true about the other in her art? 

Change can be a kind of death that makes for much mourning to till. 

But from that field comes new life.