Rosa Bonheur’s The Lion at Home is a visitor-favourite here at the gallery. The painting is a great example of the kind of realism that was popular during the Victorian era.
First exhibited in London in 1882, The Lion at Home was an immediate success with the public and critics alike.
About Rosa Bonheur
Rosa Bonheur was one of few women in the nineteenth century able to make a career as an artist. She had many exhibitions in France and England, and her work sold for high prices, similar to her male contemporaries. Her success gave hope to many aspiring women artists, but her career remained an exception. Other women artists, particularly in the UK, never gained the success they deserved.
By the time Bonheur painted this huge canvas, she had already established her reputation with another vast painting, The Horse Fair (1853).
Bonheur strove to be as accurate in detail as possible in her paintings. So much so, she obtained a police permit to wear trousers so she could visit slaughterhouses. There she could make detailed anatomical studies of the animals.
Bonheur also kept many live animals to sketch from. These included a pair of Nubian lions and their cubs who shared her studio in Fontainebleau, France. This particular painting is worked up from Bonheur's observations of those lions.
This work was recently a star attraction of a retrospective of Bonheur’s career. The exhibition, first in Bordeaux (where Bonheur was born) and then Paris, marked 200 years since her birth.
Renewed interest in Bonheur in recent years has presented new stories about her life and experiences as a professional artist. This has also revealed her romantic relationships with women, repositioning Bonheur as an LGBTQ+ icon.
