Part 11

Rosa, the eldest of the family, born in 1822, was ten years old when her mother died. Not long after, Raymond Bonheur decided to leave Bordeaux and to return to Paris, where the chances for professional success were better than in a provincial town, and where there were greater opportunities for the education of his young children. The change proved very distasteful, however, to the little ones. Accustomed to the comparative freedom of the town in which they had been brought up, and where their family had been so long rooted that their circle of friends and relatives gave them playmates and companions in plenty, they found themselves very lonely in Paris, where they were reduced for a good part of the time to such amusement as they could find in the narrow quarters of their rooms on the sixth floor of an apartment-house. It is not the custom in Paris for the children, even of the poor, to make a playground of the street, and our little ones had nobody to walk out with them but an old servant who had come with them from Bordeaux, and who was ill-fitted, for all her virtues, to take a mother's place to the children. She was honest and faithful, but like all of her class, she liked routine and order, and she could make no allowances for the restlessness of her bright-minded charge. Rosa was her especial torment; the black sheep of the brood. Household tasks she despised, and study, as it was pursued in the successive schools to which her despairing father sent her, had no charms for her. Her best playmates were animals; the horses and dogs she saw in the streets and which she fearlessly accosted; the sheep that found itself queerly lodged on the top floor of a city house; and the parrot which, as we have seen, was not only her playmate but her schoolmaster.

There came a time when the charge of such a child, so averse to rules and so given to strange ways of passing her time, became too much for the old servant with her orthodox views of life, and she persuaded Rosa's father to put her as a day-scholar with the nuns at Chaillot, a small suburb of Paris. How it happened that she was allowed to go back and forth alone, between home and school, we do not know; but it is not to be wondered at if she were irregular in her hours; if, one day, she set the nuns wondering why she did not appear at school-opening, and another day put the old servant into a twitter because she did not come home in season. The truth was, she had found that there was something better in Paris than streets and shops and tall houses; she had discovered a wood there, a veritable forest, with trees, and pools of water, and birds, and wild flowers, and though this enchanted spot which citizens called the Bois de Boulogne--not then a formal park as it is to-day--was off the road to Chaillot, yet it was not so far that she need fear getting lost in going there or in coming back. No wonder, then, if, once this way discovered of escape from tiresome school duties, it was travelled so often by Rosalie, and that her school-work became in consequence so unsatisfactory that at length the patient nuns remonstrated. They advised Rosa's father, since she neither would nor could learn anything from books, that it would be better to put her to some useful trade by which she might earn her living; and the good sisters suggested--dressmaking! The wisdom of these ladies, who could not see that they were dealing with the last woman in the world to whom dressmaking could be interesting, was matched by that of the father, who showed himself so blind to the character of his daughter that he resolved to act at once upon the advice of the nuns; and without consulting the wishes of poor Rosalie he apprenticed her straightway to a Parisian dressmaker. The docile girl allowed the yoke to be slipped over her head without complaint, but the confinement wore upon her health and spirits, and after a short trial the experiment had to be abandoned. Her father yielded to her entreaties and took her home.

The girl was long in coming to a knowledge of herself. Although she was to be, in time, a famous artist, the familiar legend of the biographers is wanting in her case; we read nothing about scribbled books or walls defaced by childish sketches, nor does she appear to have handled a pencil or a brush until she was a girl well grown. Her father's means were not sufficient to give Rosa or his other children an education such as he could wish; but an expedient suggested itself in his perplexity over this latest experiment in providing for his eldest daughter: he proposed to the principal of a young ladies' school where he taught drawing, that his services should be accepted in payment of Rosa's education. The offer was accepted, and in the regular course of study Rosa became a member of her father's drawing-class. It was not long before she surpassed all her school-fellows in that department, and found herself for the first time in her life in possession of the key to that happiness which consists in knowing what we can do, and feeling the strength within us to do it. Some of the biographers of Rosa's life speak of unhappy days at this school: the richer girls made sport of the dress of the drawing-master's daughter, and of her independent, awkward ways. Her progress in drawing, too, was counterbalanced by her slowness in her other studies; in fact her new accomplishment was such a delight to her, that in her devotion to it she became less and less interested in her books; and as for dress--that it should be clean and suited both to her means and to the work she was doing, was all that concerned her, then or since!

At the end of her first year in school, Rosa obtained her father's permission to give up her other studies and to enter his studio as pupil and assistant. From that time, though as yet she had not found the reason of her vocation, yet her true life had begun. She worked diligently under the direction of a master she loved, and her father, in his turn, delighted at the discovery of a talent so long hid, redoubled his efforts to advance his pupil and to make up for lost time.

Rosa worked for some months at copying in the Louvre, but though she worked with such diligence and skill as to win the praise of the director, she came, after a time, to feel that the mere copying of the works of other men, however great, was not the goal she was striving after; so one day she took a sudden determination, left the Louvre, packed up her painting materials, and started off for one of the rural suburbs of Paris, where she sat herself down to sketch from nature. Her love of animals, hitherto an aimless pleasure, now took on a new phase as she saw her beloved cows and sheep in their place in nature giving life and animation to the landscape.

In the winter season, when work out-of-doors was no longer pleasant or profitable, Rosa made what use she could of the few opportunities Paris had to offer for the study of animals. She spent what time she could spare from work at the horse-market; she visited the slaughter-houses, and the suburban fairs where cattle and horses, sheep and pigs compete for prizes, and in these places she filled her portfolios with sketches.

In 1840 she sent her first picture to the Salon, and as it was accepted and well received, she continued to send her work every year; but, up to 1849, her pictures were small, and had little more interest than belongs to simple studies from nature; 1849 was a memorable year to her, as it was to France. In this year her father died of cholera, just as he had been appointed director of the School of Design for Young Girls. Rosa was appointed to succeed him with the title of Honorary Directress, and her sister Juliette was made a teacher in the school. In the same year she exhibited the picture that may be said to have made her reputation with the artists and amateurs, as well as with the general public. This was her "Oxen of Cantal," a picture that combined with no little feeling for landscape the most admirable painting of cattle in repose. Its high qualities were immediately recognized. Horace Vernet, in the name of the Provisional Government, presented her with a handsome vase of Sèvres porcelain, and the gold medal for painting. In 1851, the jury selected for exhibition at the World's Fair in London another picture by Rosa, "Ploughing in the Nivernais," which made the artist's name known to England, where the national love of animals secured for her no end of praise and of substantial reward. In 1856 Rosa painted her most popular picture, "The Horse Fair," now in the Metropolitan Museum. This painting went from Paris to London, where it was bought for rising £1,500, and created such an interest in the artist's personality as would have turned the head of any ordinary woman; but Rosa Bonheur's whole life proves her no ordinary woman.

For many years Mlle. Bonheur lived in Paris in a house surrounded by a large garden where she kept a number of animals, partly for the pleasure of their companionship, partly for the opportunity it gave her of studying their habits, and using them as models. She now resides in the Château By, near Fontainebleau, where she leads the same industrious life in her advancing years that she did in the beginning of her career. She rises early, and works at her painting all day, and often spends the evening in drawing: for she takes but little interest in what is called society, and cares only for the companionship of her intimate friends, which she can enjoy without disarranging her life, or neglecting the studies she loves. She dresses with great simplicity at all times, and even when she accepts invitations, makes no concessions to the caprices of fashion. In her student-days, when visiting the abattoirs, markets, and fairs, she accustomed herself to wear such a modification of man's dress as would permit her to move about among rough men without compromising her sex. But, beside that her dignity was always safe in her own keeping, she bears testimony to the good manners and the good dispositions of the men she came in contact with. Rosa Bonheur has always been an honor to art and an honor to her sex. At seventy-two she finds herself in the enjoyment of many things that go to make a happy life. She has a well-earned fame as an artist; an abundant fortune gained by her own industry and used as honorably as it has been gained; and she has troops of friends drawn to her by her solid worth of character.

Of the great number of pictures Rosa Bonheur has painted, by far the most are of subjects found in France, but a few of the best were painted in Scotland. She has received many public honors in medals and decorations. In 1856, after painting the "Horse Fair," the Empress Eugénie visited her at her studio and bestowed upon her the Cross of the Legion of Honor, fastening the decoration to the artist's dress with her own hands. When the invading army of Prussia reached Paris, the Crown Prince gave orders that the studio of Rosa Bonheur should be respected. But though she, no doubt, holds all these honors at their worth, yet she holds still more dear the art to which she owes, not only these, but all that has made her life a treasury of happy remembrances.

[Signature of the author.]

GÉRÔME[9]

[Footnote 9: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.]

By CLARENCE COOK

(BORN 1824)

In the Paris Salon of 1847, a small picture appeared, representing a Greek boy and girl stirring up two game-cocks to fight. Although it was the work of an unknown painter, and had to contend with an unusually brilliant display of pictures, many of them by men already famous, yet it strongly attracted the general public, partly by the novelty of the subject, and partly by the careful and finished manner of the painting. It delighted the critics as well, and one of the most distinguished of them, Théophile Gautier, wrote: "A new Greek is born to us, and his name is Gérôme!"

This picture, which was to prove the first leaf in a laurel-crown to be awarded the painter in his lifetime, and not, as is so often the case, by the tardy hand of Death, was the work of Jean-Léon Gérôme, a young man of twenty-three. He had been for six years under the teaching of Paul Delaroche, part of the time in Italy, but most of it in Paris. He was born at Vesoul, a small, dull town in the Department of Haute-Saône, in 1824. His father was a goldsmith, who, like most French fathers in his rank of life, had hoped to bring up his son to succeed him in his business. The boy did for a time, we believe, work in his father's shop, but he had a stronger natural bent for painting; something perhaps in the occupation fostered, or even created, this taste--for not a few distinguished painters have been apprenticed to the goldsmith's trade--and his father, like a wise man, instead of opposing his son's wishes, did what he could to further them. He bought him painting-materials; and instead of sending him to a "school of design," or putting him under the tutelage of some third-rate drawing-master, such as is commonly found in country towns, he bought him a picture by Decamps, an artist since become famous, but then just in the dawn of his fame, and put it before his son as a model. Young Gérôme made a copy of this picture, and an artist from Paris, who happened to be passing through Vesoul, saw it, and discerning the boy's talent, gave him a letter to Paul Delaroche, encouraging him to go to Paris and there to take up the study of art as a profession. At seventeen years of age, with his father's consent and $250 in his pocket, Gérôme went up to Paris, and presenting his letter to Delaroche, was well received by him, and entered the School of Fine Arts (École des Beaux-Arts) as his pupil.

He had been with Delaroche three years and had proved himself one of the most loyal and diligent of his pupils, when an event occurred, insignificant in itself, but which was to have an important influence upon his life and give a new direction to his talent.

French studios are not as a rule very orderly places. The young men who frequent them are left pretty much to themselves, with no one to govern them or to oversee them. The artist they are studying under makes, at the most, a brief daily visit, going the round of the easels, saying a word or two to each pupil, although it often happens that he says nothing, and then departs for his proper work, leaving his pupils to their own devices. The students are for the most part like young men everywhere, a turbulent set, full of animal spirits, which sometimes carry them beyond reasonable bounds. It was a boisterous outbreak of this sort, but far wilder than common, that occurred in the studio of Delaroche, and which brought about the crisis in Gérôme's life to which we have alluded. Fortunately for him, the incident took place while Gérôme was on a visit to his parents at Vesoul, so that he was in no way implicated in the affair. He came back to find the studio closed; Delaroche, deeply disturbed, had dismissed all his pupils and announced his intention to visit Italy. His studio was to be taken during his absence, by Gleyre, and he advised those of his pupils in whom he took a personal interest, to continue their studies under his successor. Gérôme was one of those to whom he gave this advice, but Gérôme was too much attached to his master to leave him for another, and bluntly announced his purpose of following him to Rome. A few of the other pupils of Delaroche were of the same mind, and they all set out for Italy together. Arrived in Rome, Gérôme, always a hard worker, threw himself energetically into his studies; drawing the ancient buildings, the Capitol, the Colosseum; sketching in the Forum and on the Campagna; copying the pictures and the statues, saturating his mind in the spirit of antique art, and schooling his hand in its forms, until he had laid up a rich store of material for use in future pictures. On his return to Paris he worked for a while in Gleyre's studio, but when Delaroche came back from Italy, Gérôme again joined him and renewed his old relation as pupil and assistant--working, among other tasks, on the painting of "Charlemagne Crossing the Alps," a commission given to Delaroche by the Government, for the _Grande Galerie des Batailles_ at Versailles: a vast apartment lined with pictures of all the victories of the French from Soissons to Solferino.

Such work as this, however, had little interest for Gérôme. His mind at this time was full of the Greeks and Romans; his enthusiasm for Napoleon, which later was to give birth to so many pictures, had not yet awakened; nor did he care for the subjects from the histories of France and England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that had provided his master, Delaroche, with so many tragic themes for his pencil: "The Death of the Duke of Guise," "The Children of Edward," the "Death of Queen Elizabeth," "The Execution of Lady Jane Grey," "Cromwell at the Coffin of Charles I.," and others of the same strain.

Gérôme's visit to Italy had awakened in him a strong interest in the life of the antique world, and this would naturally be strengthened by all that he would hear and see of the growing interest of the public in the same subject: an interest kindled by the discoveries of archaeologists in classic soil: in Greece and Italy, in Assyria and Egypt. These discoveries had filled the museums and the cabinets of private collectors with beautiful and interesting fragments illustrating the external life of the past, and illuminating its poetry; and it is no wonder that some of the younger artists rejoiced in the new world of anecdote and story that opened so richly before them.

However it came about--whether his own interest in the antique life communicated itself to his fellows, or whether they, all together, simply shared in the interest taken in the subject by the world about them--Gérôme and some of his companions in Delaroche's studio showed such a predilection for classic themes, that they were nicknamed by the critics "The New Greeks." Among Gérôme's fellow-pupils were two young men, Hamon and Aubert, who later gained no small applause by their playful and familiar way of treating classic themes. They are well known to us by engravings from their pictures, which are in all our shops. Hamon's "My Sister is not at home," and Aubert's various pretty fancies of nymphs and cupids, while they are not great works of art, are reasonably sure of a long life, due to their innocent freshness and simplicity.

Delaroche's pupils were working all together in friendly competition for the grand Roman prize which was to give the fortunate one the right to four years' study in Rome at the expense of the state. Gérôme's studio was shared by his friends Picou and Hamon. Hamon, writing in later years about his youthful days, says: "Companions and rivals at the same time, we were all working together for the Grand Prix de Rome. Gérôme inspired us all with the love of hard work, and of hard work to the accompaniment of singing and laughing."

But in the intervals of his hard work for the prize, Gérôme was also working on a picture which he hoped to have accepted for the Salon. This was the picture we spoke of in the beginning of this notice: "Two Young Greeks stirring-up Game-cocks to fight." When it was finished Gérôme showed it to his master with many misgivings; but Delaroche encouraged him to send it to the Salon. It was accepted, and as we have seen, won for Gérôme a great success with the public. The next year, 1848, he again exhibited, but the impression he made was less marked than on the first occasion. His former picture had a subject such as it was, of his own devising. The "Cock-fight" was not an illustration of any passage in Greek poetry, and in spite of its antique setting, it had a modern air, and to this, no doubt, its popularity was largely due. But in 1848 he essayed an illustration of the Greek poet, Anacreon, translating into picture the poem that tells how, one winter evening, sitting by his fire, the old poet was surprised by a sound of weeping outside his door, and opening it, found Cupid wet and shivering and begging for a shelter from the cold. The man takes the pretty, dimpled mischief to his bosom, warms his feet and hands at the fire, dries his bow and arrows, and lets him sip wine from his cup. Then, when Cupid is refreshed and warmed, he tries his arrows, now here, now there, and at last aims one straight at his benefactor's heart, and laughing at the jest, flies out at the open door. Gérôme's picture was in three panels. The first showed the poet opening the door to the sobbing Cupid, with his bedraggled wings and dripping curls; in the next, the rosy ingrate wounds his benefactor; in the third, the poet sits disconsolate by his hearth, musing over the days when Love was his guest, if but for an hour. As the story was an old one, so many an artist before Gérôme had played with it as a subject for a picture. Jean-François Millet himself, another pupil of Delaroche, though earlier than Gérôme, had tried his hand at illustrating Anacreon's fable before he found his proper field of work in portraying the occupations of the men and women about him, the peasants among whom he was born and bred.

Gérôme's picture did nothing to advance his fortunes with the public. 1848 was a stormy time in France and in all Europe, and people were not in the mood to be amused with such trifles as Anacreon and his Cupid. The pictures in that year's Salon that drew the public in crowds about them were Couture's "The Romans of the Decline of the Empire," in which all Paris saw, or thought it saw, the handwriting-on-the-wall for the government of Louis-Philippe; and the "Shipwrecked Sailors in a Bark," of Delacroix, a wild and stormy scene of terror that seemed to echo the prophecies of evil days at hand for France with which the time was rife.

Gérôme's next picture, however, was to bring him once more before the public, and to carry his name beyond his native France even as far as America. Leaving for the nonce his chosen field of antiquity, where yet he was to distinguish himself, he looked for a subject in the Paris of his own day. "The Duel after the Masquerade" opens for us a corner of the Bois de Boulogne--the fashionable park on the outskirts of Paris--where in the still dawn of a winter's day, a group of men are met to witness a duel between two of their companions who have quarrelled at a masked ball. The ground is covered with a light fall of snow; the bare branches of the trees weave their network across the gray sky, and in the distance we see the carriages that have brought the disputants to the field. The duel is over. One of the men, dressed in the costume of Pierrot, the loose white trousers and slippers, the baggy white shirt, and white skull-cap, falls, mortally wounded, into the arms of his second: the pallor of coming death masked by the white-painted face. The other combatant, a Mohawk Indian (once a staple character at every masked-ball in Paris: curious survival of the popularity of Cooper's novels), is led wounded off the field by a friend dressed as Harlequin. Gérôme in this striking picture showed for the first time that talent as a story-teller to which he is so largely indebted for his reputation. Whatever his subject may be, it is always set forth in the clearest manner, so that everyone may understand the story without the need of an interpreter.