NO HORSES IN THE HOUSE!

A tribute to a 19th-century artist driven by talent, stubbornness, and impatience with nonsense.

“Balivernes!” (French for nonsense) says Rosa Bonheur when told that it’s “unladylike” to visit the horse market in Paris. And again, “Balivernes,” when she sees men allowed to cross-dress as members of the opposite sex but is (wrongly) told that she could never receive such permission. Drawn by Bron as a determined but very small, White-presenting child surrounded by towering horses and grown-ups in period clothing and, in group scenes, some variation in skin color, Bonheur comes across in Messier’s terse account of her early life as an artistically gifted force of nature who drove her reluctant father to give her art lessons, brought live farm animals to her family’s apartment to draw and paint, and quickly shouldered her way to public attention at the Paris Salon with the huge and stunning Horse Fair. This version of her story ends there, with just a brief note and a closing timeline covering the rest of her rise to fame, her death 10 years after that of her “lifelong companion,” Nathalie Micas, and the (now, at long last, waning) eclipse of her reputation. Ruth Sanderson’s A Storm of Horses (2022) presents younger readers with more analytical views of Bonheur’s art and career, but for all its brevity, this offers an equally vivid glimpse of her character. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

More sketch than finished portrait but gives the artist’s personality its due.