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Once the two were unconsciously rivals, under the Second Empire, when the Cross of Honor was given to a woman for the first time, out of the limited circle of battle-field or hospital-ward heroines, women soldiers or Sisters of Charity. No artist seemed to deserve this highest distinction more than George Sand, but, with some narrowness of view, it was decided that the tales connected with her bohemian youth ran counter to offering her this insignia directly; so it went, without any opposition on her part-far from it-to her son Maurice. When congratulated upon this honor, the latter used to say, humorously, "It's my mother's cross, you know!"

To offset this, the Empress Eugénie offered the decoration spontaneously to Rosa Bonheur, calling attention to the beauty of a whole life entirely devoted to art and family duties.

Indeed, Rosa Bonheur's career is one of those that must be respected as much as it is admired; for not only her acts and aims, but those of all her relatives, father, brothers, and sister, so tenderly united among themselves and about her, bear witness to that family life which perhaps is not comprehended anywhere else in the same way as it is in France. A prize for virtue might have been added to the "Cross of the Brave" for her, and all the Bonheur family would have deserved a share in it. Let us look at their life as far back as the distant date of 1822, the year in which Rosa, the eldest of the four children, was born. At Bordeaux the Bonheur couple was as poor as it was happy, for theirs was a love marriage. To feed his nestlings, the father, who at first had wished to paint works of high art—as is proved in the Church of St. Saurin-renounced this and accepted inglorious tasks, his wife, too, giving lessons. Being delicate, however, she broke down. After her loss, Raymond Bonheur could not remain either in the house or the town from which she had departed forever. He left Bordeaux and went to Paris with the orphans, Rosa, the eldest, being seven years old. Commercial production became a necessity for him, yet he found time to paint portraits and landscapes which are not without merit. As his children grew older, he gave lessons in the boarding-schools they attended, to pay their term-bills.

a primary day-school in the Champs Elysées quarter she used to run away towards the Bois de Boulogne, which in 1830 was far from being what it is now. No matter; the meager copses, dusty lanes, and coarse grass were enough, as there was nothing better to be had, to delight her; she was already in love with nature, and tried her best to be its interpreter, sketching whatever she saw on the sand with a stick, while at home she always carried a bit of charcoal in her pocket and used it for drawing on every available surface. In this she resembles Giotto, who, while watching his goats near Florence, drew the animals intrusted to his care on the side of a rock, as he was doing when Cimabue came past and carried him off towards higher destinies. In Rosa's case Cimabue was represented by her excellent father, who noticed her tendencies with joy; but he would have preferred, nevertheless, that her excess of ardor had not led her to cover all the margins of her exercise-books with sketches, nor to strew about caricatures of every professor-caricatures severely confiscated by the board ing-school mistress, who made a collection of them with secret indulgence.

Reprimanded constantly, and never receiving any other awards, Rosa always carried off the first prize for drawing. When at last she came home, after a glad farewell to her school, she could follow her tastes without restraint. She drew all day long; in the evening, and until late at night, she modeled clay and wax; a double talent for sculpture and painting struggled a long time for the mastery, until her passion for color was victorious.

Almost every morning a very small, dark young girl, dressed without the slightest hint of fashion or coquetry, entered the Louvre; all through the day she remained absorbed in copying; no one ever saw her look about her or take the least interest in anything that was not her work. work. Her father, the only professor she ever had, let her study as she pleased. She was allowed to go beyond the limits of Paris and ask the suburbs for the inspiration which, later on, she sought in the fertile fields of Nivernais, the Pyrenees mountains, and on the Scottish heaths.

In 1841 she made her first appearance in the Salon with two pictures" Sheep

We are told that while Rosa was still at and Goats" and "Two Rabbits."

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ficed to bring her honest, sincere, and noble qualities to the fore, and here the close study of reality did not exclude a robust kind of poetry. She never passed through years of groping and obscurity, but was remarked at once, and received a first-class medal as early as 1848. Horace Vernet, the President of the Jury of Awards, proclaimed her success and presented her with a valuable Sèvres vase in the name of the Government. That same year her admirable "Cantal Oxen" was bought at a very high price for England.

All this made Rosa Bonheur happy, especially for her father's sake, and he, now freed from his cares, rejuvenated and delighted, had begun to paint again on his own account. As he had taught all his children well, the name of Bonheur, during many years, was repeated four or five times in succession on the Salon catalogue; but Rosa was always the star of the first magnitude in the midst of the Pleiad. It is touching to hear her regret that her brother Auguste never received his share of the renown due him, and she exalts his merits -she, so absolutely free from all vanity as regards herself.

In 1849 her " Plowing in Nivernais," now in the Luxembourg Gallery, together with another superb example, "Haymaking in Auvergne," created a real sensation. In 1853 the celebrated "Horse Fair," now the property of the Metropolitan Museum of New York, marked the climax of her genius, so full of virile power. The studies for this work took eighteen months, during which time she went to the horsemarket regularly twice a week. Scrupulous fidelity to nature does not, however, shut out imagination in her case. To make sure of this, one need only look at the collection of engravings reproducing her numerous works spread all over the world, or the scenes, so full of spirit and movement, she has named "Béarnais Shepherd," where the sheep are crowded against the streaming rock sheltering their guardian during a thunder-storm; "The Boat" in Scotland, showing a herd of oxen swimming across a stream, while held in by the boatmen; "Aragonese Burriqueros driving their beasts through a Pyrenean

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"The Razzia," "The Hustling Herd," "Fighting Stallions," and the admirable "Sheepfold" bathed in a flood of moonlight that throws bright touches upon

the fleece of the animals closely pressed against each other. It is evident that the impressions she receives are photographed upon her memory, as was the case with George Sand, who never needed notes.

Notwithstanding the beauty of her finished paintings, what we should most covet in her very complete work would, perhaps, be her original sketches. She has never consented to give up a single one of these, in spite of the most tempting offers, keeping them as material for further work, and they now permit her to paint with all the qualities and freshness of youth, to which are added the fruits of experience.

It is easy to see the advantage of living in a village like By, for an artist such as Rosa Bonheur. The forest offers her the thickets from which her deer and roebucks step out; the plain is the stage for her plowing scenes; while running streams and vast horizons surround her. At the opening of her career she was not so happily situated. At first she lived on a sixth floor in the Rue Rumford, where she had found a way to make a sheep climb up to her rooms, but without any other possibility of becoming acquainted with oxen than by heroically going to study them at the slaughter-house, in the midst of carnage. Next she occupied a sort of cottage in the Rue d'Assas, about which an anecdote is current whose authenticity we cannot guarantee. When she moved there, and just as her goods and chattels were being carried in, she returned, in muddy boots, from a day's painting in the country; the movers, misled by her accouterments, took her for a boy of their own class, and asked her, roughly enough, to help them instead of standing there idly looking on; which she did, with a good grace, putting up with all their bad jokes on the weakness of her muscles. Later on, having resumed her feminine garments, which she calls her "natural clothes," and always wears in company and in town, she came back among the workmen and gave them a generous fee.

Her kindness and charity are well known, and she did not wait for a fortune before she gave more than her superfluity when she could help a brother artist poorer than herself. Her only personal money needs were for journeys which rarely took her out of France, and never further than

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