Page:Woman in Art.djvu/106

WOMAN IN ART to earn and many to keep." The mother became assistant bread-winner, but the extra strain was too much for one of delicate nature, and her children were left motherless for a time. Fortunately for them, the step-mother was unusual in her interest in and kindness to them.

As a girl, Rosa Bonheur could not be made to do housework or sew as did her sister and her friend Natalie Mecus. She was often the despair of her mother, who would exclaim, "There goes that boy in petticoats." At a first chance she would fly off like a bird escaping its cage, follow a horse, dog, or donkey with its load, or a drayman along the quay, or a boatman dreamily guiding his boat along the sluggish Seine. A bit of brown paper and charcoal served as material. Sketches "while you wait" amused groups of children of assorted sizes, those of her own home often included.

Her father placed her in a private school where he gave drawing lessons for her tuition. Even there the embryo artist made albums of her schoolbooks, amply illustrating the animal kingdom rather than any branch of study they contained.

In her early years Paris had not civilized the Bois de Boulogne as we know it today, and in its margin the young girl made friends and studies of the shy creatures that homed in that nearby forest.

Her first city studio was on the sixth floor of a pension, and to that lofty atelier she conducted a sheep for a model, but by what means she accomplished the exploit is not known.

Her life of seventy-seven years is a most interesting romance, devoted to her one and only love of animals. Here again we find a proof of Goethe's truism:

"You ne'er from heart to heart can speak inspiring

Save your own heart be eloquent."

Seldom have the annals of art chronicled such persistence to an ideal in a child. Her father was her constant teacher and critic and must have taken great satisfaction in the developing genius of his daughter. She spent days at the Louvre copying from the works of Paul Potter and Salvator Rosa; the one a slavish naturalist, the other painting rugged nature, keying the wildness of torrent and rocks to the pitch of his vivid imagination.

Rosa Bonheur's first work to come before the jury of the Salon shows rabbits nibbling carrots; a second was a flock of sheep and goats. Both were accepted, which was a delight to her father and a real encouragement to the nineteen-year-old artist. She was but twenty-one when she received 80