An unpublished pastel by Rosa Bonheur will be auctioned in Paris on March 20 at Christie’s during the drawing room, while this animal painter and feminist figure of the 19th century will soon be played on screen by Mélanie Laurent. The pastel, made in 1896, after the meeting of Rosa Bonheur (1822-1899) with Buffalo Bill during the Universal Exhibition of 1889, “was not known and had been in a private French collection for several generations”, a explained Hélène Rihal, director of the antique and 19th century drawings department at Christie’s Paris. It was “initially acquired by a collector, Albert Soubise, lawyer, music critic and author from the end of the 19th century, contemporary of Rosa Bonheur, then transmitted to his descendants,” said the expert.
94 cm long (by 57 cm wide, Editor’s note) and entitled “study for the emigration of bison”, it is “probably the largest drawing we know of her, estimated between 100,000 and 150,000 euros”, according to Hélène Rihal. It could well be of interest to museums, “increasingly inclined to purchase works by women artists, particularly in the United States,” according to her.
In 2019, a painting by Rosa Bonheur also representing bison was sold at auction for $700,000 by the American house Coeur d’Alene Art Auction (Idaho), adds the specialist. In 2022, a retrospective at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris brought the artist out of the oblivion into which she had fallen after having probably been the most famous and most famous female painter. sold in its century, as much in France as in England and the United States, according to specialists.
Rosa Bonheur, better known for the Parisian cafés that bear her name and as a homosexual icon than for her painting before this retrospective, spent the last forty years of her life at the Château de By in Thomery, in Seine-et-Marne, thirty of which with her childhood friend Nathalie Micas, also a painter and died in 1889. A biopic directed by French director Fabienne Berthaud, where the painter is to be played by actress Mélanie Laurent, is announced for 2025.