Rosa Bonheur, née Marie-Rosalie Bonheur, (b. Bordeaux, France, March 16, 1822 – d. Thomery (By), France, May 25, 1899) was a French animalière and realist artist, one of few female sculptors.
Bonheur was the eldest child in a family of artists. Her father Raimond Bonheur was a landscape and portrait painter and an early adherent of Saint-Simonianism, a Christian-socialist sect that promoted the education of women alongside men. The Saint-Simonians also prophesized the coming of a female messiah. Her mother Sophie (neé Marquis) who died when Rosa Bonheur was only eleven, had been a piano teacher. Bonheur's younger siblings included the animal painters Auguste Bonheur and Juliette Bonheur and the animal sculptor Isidore Jules Bonheur. That the Bonheur family was renowned as a family of artists is attested to by the fact that Francis Galton, the cousin of Charles Darwin used the Bonheurs as an example of "Hereditary Genius" in his 1869 essay of the same title.
Bonheur was born in Bordeaux (where her father had been friends with Francisco Goya who was living there in exile) but moved to Paris in 1828 at the age of six with her mother and brothers, her father having gone ahead of them to establish a residence and income.
She died at the age of 77. Many of her paintings, which had not been shown publicly, were sold at auction in Paris in 1900. - wikipedia
