WOMAN IN ART
her first medal. Her pictures were not only accepted but sold at fair prices. Even in her teen years, when attempting to add to the family exchequer, her small pictures and sketches brought three and four hundred francs each.
It has been said that she was a naturalist in painting and so she was: so was Paul Potter, but no two pair of eyes see nature exactly alike; no two temperaments understand equally the human or animal they essay to paint. And it is safe to say no other artist has had the love for and confidence in the creatures wherewith the Creator peopled forest, crag, and jungle than Rosa Bonheur had. She made them feel her love, not her mastery.
It has also been said that she was not original, opened no new outlook nor depicted a new horizon or ideal in art. Has any other painter of animals come so near the fulfillment of the prophecy of Isaiah XI-6? Is it not a new outlook to see in the symbolic a reality in the actual because of the larger understanding of love?
Human sympathy means much even to the creatures we cannot understand.
Rosa Bonheur's experiences in Scotland were a joy to her. One realizes how truly she saw and felt when studying the cattle on their native heath and Highland crags. On hills covered with bracken and purple heather the artist gained the freedom, the unaffrighted poise of roving herds of deer, of cattle and sheep, nor had she need to compose an appropriate background for her studies from the North. The woman with her breadth of soul and love of nature breathed deep of the same salt air that swept from the sea over mountain and glen, as it filled the valleys and rising, rising, wreathed the Bens with that magic mist that beautifies the rugged majesty of mountains and softly glorifies the hills.
Was it not a touch of originality to paint the denizens of the Highlands, browsing or startled to attention, as they peer through the mist-laden atmosphere? Was it not fulfilling an ideal that the simple pliant bodies of her lions in repose should lend their heaviness to undulations of ground where they lie? Soft as a kitten they seem, yet their weight is impressive.
Reading the life of Rosa Bonheur as it unfolds her activities, one experiences a personal interest in her successes.
In 1845 her work shown at the Salon received a third medal, and the following year she was awarded the first medal. When we consider the personnel of the committee passing on more than five thousand canvases—for it was the year celebrating the restitution of a republican government after the
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