Your name sounds fictitious or like the title of a children's book.

But Bonheur, Glück, was actually the name of the family of artists into which Marie Rosalie was born in 1822.

When she was young, she shortened her first name to a resolute pink.

Probably no painter in the early nineteenth century approached her career more purposefully and at the same time full of talent than Rosa Bonheur.

Her brother Auguste portrayed her with a confident gaze in 1848, an animal sculpture and a palette refer to her art.

In the same year the whole family exhibited at the Paris Salon.

The name Bonheur filled almost a page in the catalogue, with father Raimond, brothers Auguste and Isidore, but above all Rosa.

It was her eighth time at the Salon, with six paintings and two sculptures.

The award with a gold medal meant the breakthrough.

The fact that a woman painted animals, and large ones at that, such as cows, bulls, sheep and horses, was stunned and aroused admiration through the convincing execution.

A government order followed.

Bonheur showed her skills with the large-format “Field cultivation in the Nivernais”.

In order to be able to capture this scene of plowing in a painterly way without idealizing exaggeration, but rather in its sensual experience, with lanes of lumpy earth, with the exertion of the cattle pulling the plow and the farmers trotting wearily behind them, she traveled to the province of Nièvre and sketched out country life Location.

The painting can now be seen in the show "Rosa Bonheur (1822-1899)" at the Musée des Beaux Arts in Bordeaux, the painter's birthplace.

It is one of the few that was shown in a museum before this special exhibition (Musée d'Orsay).

The monumental, unfinished main work "La foulaison du blé en Camargue" has so far been permanently exhibited in Bordeaux, with raging wild horses threshing the wheat.

It was only for this retrospective on the occasion of the 200th birthday that many works were taken from museum depots and partially restored.

There is also a recently opened holdings, mainly drawings, which remained in Bonheur's studio at By Castle near Fontainebleau.

The exhibition means a rediscovery of the artist.

Her teachers were Father and Nature

"I am the student of my father and the beautiful, grandiose nature," she summed up.

Bonheur drew everything she could get her hands on from an early age.

Especially the animals of a small menagerie she kept in the apartment after the family moved from Bordeaux to Paris.

Her mother's death had a decisive impact on her.

Because she died of exhaustion after the fourth child was born and the husband's meager income had to be supplemented by knitting and piano lessons.

Raimond Bonheur belonged to the Saint-Simonists, a movement oscillating between early socialism and sectarianism, which already advocated equality.

The open-minded spirit in the parental home, but also the contradictory fact that the mother had worked herself to death, justified Rosa Bonheur's determined decision for personal independence.

She was educated by her father and regularly went to the Louvre to study copies of the Old Masters, such as animal paintings and rural scenes by Jean-Baptiste Oudry or Paulus Potter.

Even in a stylistically perfect painting with rabbits munching carrots, at the age of eighteen she knows how to capture the typical posture and expression of her animal models.