Le Marché Aux Chevaux

The Paris Horse Market—painted here by a woman artist Amy told me about when we met the other day. Her name is Rosa Bonheur and she was born in 1822, which makes her about the same age as Tori. She is a Realist and an Animalière (known for her skill in the realistic portrayal of animals.)

Rosa came to Paris from Bordeaux in 1828. She was six years old and her mother was a piano teacher. It's possible the Bonheurs could have met the Farrencs through this fact. Rosa's father was a painter, a friend of Goya's and a passionate Saint-Simonian socialist who believed in equality for women. Saint-Simon influenced many of the artists I'm writing about including Georges Sand, Berlioz, Delacroix and Hugo.

Rosa, like Georges Sand, became famous for walking around in men's clothing, smoking cigars, and riding horseback astride like a man. I like her look. (She changed this portrait, which someone else painted—adding the red bull.) She apparently studied animal physiology by going to the horse market (animals not sold for equestrian purposes were sold for meat) and butchers. She even obtained a special dispensation from the Paris police saying she could dress in men's clothing to do her research. Most interesting.

The market was located along Boulevard d'Hôpital between Barrière d'Italie (now Place d'Italie) and the Hôpital de la Pitié-Salpêtrière, which coincidentally, was the asylum where Gericault painted a famous series of portraits for French psychiatrist Étienne-Jean Georget. (Salpêtrière is known these days is a prestigious teaching the hospital—where they took Princess Diana that night she died.)

The Barrière d'Italie was a city gate in the wall called the Farmers-General. The wall was built in the late 18th century and was unpopular because it was built not to protect Paris, but to enforce tax collections on goods entering Paris. I'm pretty sure it's the wall Hugo is writing about in Les Misérables. I have to do more research, but from what I've found so far, the taxes were dropped before the French Revolution and then reinstated by Napoleon. It's not clear what was happening in 1830, but as I remember from our Revolutionary Paris tour, the wall was still being used. It was not completely demolished until the 1860s.

Interestingly, every time I go to my classes in the south, I get off the Metro at one of the old gates in that wall, Place Denfert-Rochereau. The gate, called Place d'Enfer, is a setting in the opera La Bohème, which is taken from Scènes de la vie de bohème written by Henri Murger, a contemporary of my time period. It's about Bohemian culture. He was part of a group of artists who called themselves "water drinkers" because they were too poor to afford wine. Among other things, Murger wrote lyrics, the most famous being La Chanson de Musette, which Gautier reviewed. (Gautier is the author and literary critic who wrote the ballet Giselle—a friend of Hugo's who appears in my book.) Gautier said Murger's lyrics were "a tear, which has become a pearl of poetry." So, whether or not they all knew each other, they knew of each other and obviously all this fits together, n'est-ce pas?

Back to Rosa. The question, of course, is who knew Rosa? And the connection has got to be horses. Gericault, Delacroix and Rosa Bonheur were all fascinated with horses. Delacroix may very well have visited the horse market. Gericualt certainly did. Like Rosa, he studied dead bodies and went so far as to visit morgues when he was working on The Raft of the Medusa. But then, so did Michelangelo and da Vinci—and both Rosa and Gericault spent time copying the masters in the Louvre to learn their craft.

I'm pretty sure Rosa studied Gericault's horses. You can see evidence in her work. Certainly Delacroix poured over Gericault's horses when working to paint his own. According to Amy, one of Gericault's images—of a lion attacking a horse—which I found at the library is almost indistinguishable from Delacriox's, (which, of course, was painted later.)

And these guys rode horses. Amy likes to say that horses were their "hot rods," their fast cars. One thing Tori and Rosa share in common is a love of horses. Perhaps Tori needs to ride before this book is over. And there's Georges Sand too; she wrote about riding astride (like Rosa did) as a girl. In fact, one would think that Rosa and Georges would have been well-aware of one another. Maybe a scene of these women riding together? Could such a thing have happened?

Rosa was accepted into the 1841 Salon with a painting of rabbits. She was only 19—still the Academy refused to allow her to study at the prestigeous École des Beaux-Arts because she was a female. The same thing happened to Louise Farennc. She could not study at the Conservatoire de Musique because she was a woman, but eventually she was asked to teach there. These are women pushing the envelop, moving the destiny of women along; the kind of women Virginia Woolf was referencing in her famous "Shakespeare's Sister" discussion.

While studying for my midterms, I read that when Louis XIV established the Academy in the 17th century, he explicitly said it should include artists regardless of their sex. Only a limited number of women were ever accepted, however. And at one point, The Academy passed a rule that no more than four women could be part of the Academy at any one time—younger women had to wait for someone to die. And then in 1770, the Academy eliminated women altogether. They couldn't compete for any of the prizes either. In other words, no professional career was possible. Women were not allowed back into The Academy until 1922. That's intense.

So, like Georges Sand, Rosa Bonheur fought dramatically against the limits placed on women in her day. "What a bore to be limited in movement when one is a girl," she's quoted as saying. She never married and seems to have had two women partners over the years—so if I include her, she will bring another dimension to the book. She feels a little like Gertrude Stein.

One last tidbit about Rose: she had a pet lion. This photo was taken much later in her life. Curiously, Rosa, Géricault and Delacriox all painted lions and other big cats.

Cats and horses: they certainly have my number.