What were Rosa Bonheur political or religious beliefs?

Rosa Bonheur, was a French artist, mostly a painter of animals but also a sculptor, in a realist style.

Rosa Bonheur’s paintings include Ploughing in the Nivernais, first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1848, and now at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and The Horse Fair (in French: Le marché aux chevaux), which was exhibited at the Salon of 1853 (finished in 1855) and is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City.

Rosa Bonheur was widely considered to be the most famous female painter of the nineteenth century and though she was more popular in England than in her native France, she was decorated with the French Legion of Honour by the Empress Eugénie in 1865, and was promoted to Officer of the order in 1894.

Rosa Bonheur was the first female artist to be given this award.

Rosa Bonheur’s father was Oscar-Raymond Bonheur, a landscape and portrait painter who encouraged his daughter’s artistic talents. Though of Jewish origin, the Bonheur family adhered to Saint-Simonianism, a Christian-socialist sect that promoted the education of women alongside men.

In a world where gender expression was policed, Rosa Bonheur broke boundaries by deciding to wear trousers, shirts and ties, although not in her painted portraits or posed photographs.

Rosa Bonheur did not do this because she wanted to be a man, though she occasionally referred to herself as a grandson or brother when talking about her family; rather, she identified with the power and freedom reserved for men.