Conférence : Rosa Bonheur en Nivernais

When she arrived in the Nièvre in autumn 1848, Rosa Bonheur, who was 26 years old, was already an established animal painter. That year, at the Salon de peinture de Paris, she won a 1st class medal for all the works she exhibited, as well as being commissioned by the State to paint a scene of ploughing. Wishing to work on the motif, she was invited by the Mathieu family to stay at the Château de la Cave in Beaumont-Sardolles (Nièvre).
It was in the farms and fields of the surrounding area that she made the preparatory studies for her painting, Ploughing in the Nièvre, which was exhibited at the Salon of 1849 and met with immense success, a success that was to continue over time.
A realistic painting, but also a symbolic one, it has been copied enormously and reproduced on all sorts of media right up to the present day. Rosa Bonheur stayed in the Nièvre region again in 1850, 1851 and 1852. By this time, her career had really taken off. Her work, which did not end until her death in 1899, was considerable, as was her international reputation.
The presence in the ARTnimal! exhibition of several works by Rosa Bonheur provides a pretext for evoking her life and her sojourns in the Nivernais region, which inspired in particular the iconic work Labourage en Nivernais.