Rosa Bonheur in Nineteenth-Century French Drawings from the Cleveland Museum of Art

The CMA holds an internationally renowned collection of drawings from 19th-century France, highlighted in the  exhibition Nineteenth-Century French Drawings from the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Bonheur achieved celebrity status during her lifetime for her depictions of animals, such as the subject of Cleveland’s watercolor from around 1875, Stag Lying Down.

Stag is one such work by Bonheur that shows a favorite subject. The animal rests peacefully on a grassy forest floor, unaware of the viewer's (or artist's) presence. 

She once wrote of the animals that “I care nothing for the fashionable…I, who find all that is wanted in my…stags of the forest,” words that suggest the importance of Cleveland’s drawing to the artist.

Although Cleveland acquired Stag in the 1970s, Bonheur has had played an important role in the collection for much longer: her Sheep was the first 19^th-century French drawing acquired by the CMA in 1915, months before the museum’s opening.

Bonheur was also a favorite of Cleveland collector Muriel Butkin, who generously bequeathed her collection of French drawings to the CMA in 2008.

Butkin’s transformative gift included one of Bonheur’s many impressionistic studies of trees.

It also featured an 1873 watercolor that revisits the subject of Bonheur’s most celebrated painting, The Horse Fair.

Cleveland’s watercolor reveals the important role that drawing played in creating such paintings - from preliminary studies to finished works and later reinterpretations.