"Grazing Ewe" | Rosa Bonheur

ROSA BONHEUR
French, 1822-1899

"Mouton Broutant" or Grazing Ewe

Dark-brown patina | sand-cast bronze | Signed in base "Rosa B." | almost certainly cast by Peyrol (unmarked) circa 1860
5 5/8" H x 8 1/2” W x 4” D

Though she only produced a limited variety of sculpture models in her lifetime, Rosa Bonheur’s sheep are some of the most cherished. Sensitive and exacting, the manner in which she could capture their chaotic wool while also rendering very fine details in the skin of the eyes and striations in the fur of the legs and face is noteworthy.

Rosa produced a great number of wax casts of sheep and cattle that were never cast in bronze, allowing light to shine through or against them to most accurately capture the creatures in her painting process. She is said to have offered Pierre-Jules Mêne advice to do the same as he was developing his sculptural groups and suggested he contact her brother-in-law, Hippolyte Peyrol, to have some models cast for his own process. She was known for her great generosity and reportedly stopped submitting bronze models at Salon in 1848, the same year her brother Isidore Bonheur began exhibiting, instead changing her focus entirely to painting in an effort to allow his career to more fully develop without competition from her animal models.

Rosa was particularly good at capturing charming characteristics of her animals without even a hint of the Romanticism found in works by academic animal sculptors of the years prior. It was common practice to anthropomorphize the animal in search for a higher virtue, inserting emotions and expressions onto animal life with little regard for reality. Like her contemporaries, Antoine-Louis Barye and Pierre-Jules Mêne, Rosa reacted against this quite strongly and sought to present the animal as it existed in nature without the presence of man to justify it as "art".

Her grazing ewe is a gentle creature, confident and safe as it grazes in the peaceful pasture briefly represented in the naturalistic base. Mouton Broutant is held in the permanent collection of the Museum of Bordeaux in France, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco as well as the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. It is also held in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Fine Arts (acc. no. 1986.256).

Mouton Broutant was her first sculpture to exhibit at the Paris Salon in her 1842 debut. It is an exquisite representation of her ability to capture the natural animal and the present cast in particular shows exquisite detailing clearly captured from the mold and with minimal cold-tooling by the foundry. The surface is finished in a dark-brown patina with relieved highlights throughout the wool that reveal autumnal hues. The quality of casting is superb with a very thin base edge and expert finishing. The present model has no foundry marking, but is almost certainly cast by Peyrol.
Literature & Further Reading:

Animals in Bronze, Christopher Payne, p. 371-2
Bronzes of the 19th Century, Dictionary of Sculptors, Pierre Kjellberg, p. 106-107
Art Bronzes, Michael Forrest, p. 471
Bronze Sculpture of Les Animaliers, Jane Horswell, 1971, p. 177
The Animaliers, James Mackay, 1971, p. 49
Rosa Bonheur: Sa Vie, Son Oeuvre, Anna Klumpke, 1909

Condition Report:
Light rubbing to the raised elements and subtle relieving of patina. Some rubbing to base edges. Carefully cleaned in-house and sealed in conservator's grade wax. A very fine presentation.

ref. 505GPT23P