Rosa Bonheur's Petticoat
- Stephanie Brown
- Apr 9
- 3 min read
The year our daughters went to college and we moved back to California I was hired to teach a course about museums. It was for Stanford's Continuing Studies program, evening classes offered to community members, taught by people with a lot of qualifications and some extra time. In preparing for that course I stumbled across an object in the collection database of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
It was a black quilted satin petticoat that had belonged to Rosa Bonheur.
Bonheur was one of the most famous and successful painters of her era in France; she churned out countless paintings of animals.
There's a video of Wayne Thiebaud looking at and talking about Bonheur's enormous painting The Horse Fair, in the Met's collection. I commend it to you: you will get a little of your faith back.
Anyway, Bonheur's animals have personalities, not in a kitschy way but in the way that, if you hired someone to paint your family dog, you would want her to do it.
She lived in France from 1822-1899 and, although she very much wanted to see the American West and visit her friend Buffalo Bill Cody, she never crossed the Atlantic.
So how, I wondered, did her petticoat come to be in a museum in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park?
The answer lay deeper in the museum's object record. Another artist, Anna Klumpke, had donated Bonheur's petticoat. Klumpke was a native San Franciscan who had grown up in Europe, the eldest of a family of extraordinary daughters. Anna became an artist; her sister Augusta, a neurologist; her sister Dorothea, an astronomer; her sister Julia, a composer. The French government awarded Anna, Augusta, and Dorothea the Legion of Honor for their distinguished careers and service to France.
When Anna Klumpke was 42, in 1898, she painted Bonheur's portrait. More than that: she moved into Bonheur's chateau and became the 76 year old artist's companion for the last eighteen months of her life. Bonheur made Klumpke her heir, and Klumpke wrote her friend's biography, took charge of selling hundreds of Bonheur's works, and lived for the next thirty years in her inherited Château of By.
But the petticoat. I could put together the broad strokes of Bonheur and the Klumpke sisters' biographies with some judicious noodling around, but what brought the petticoat of a French artist to one of the West's earliest art museums?
Anna Klumpke returned to her hometown in the early 1930s. She, her sister Julia, and their niece bought a house in the Richmond District. Anna engaged in the Bay Area's art scene. She exhibited her art, lectured about Bonheur, served on committees, and painted. And, in 1941, the year before she died, Klumpke donated to the de Young Museum the clothes Rosa Bonheur had worn to have her portrait painted in 1898: the petticoat, skirt, vest, and jacket.
That much I learned over a decade ago. Since then Bonheur and Klumpke have popped up more regularly than I would have imagined. I researched Bonheur for the Haggin Museum, which has a few of her paintings. She gradually became an artist whose work I looked out for, and made a point of seeing if I could. Klumpke remained a mystery that I hoped to scrape away at in the indeterminate future.
A few months ago I was talking with a friend and Anna and that petticoat came up. My friend, a historian herself, was just skeptical enough of my ever getting to that project that I spent an hour the next day seeing what I could turn up. It turns out: there's a lot. Plenty. Anna Klumpke led a remarkable life and, what's more, her letters and scrapbooks survive in an attic in the French village of Thomery, near Fontainebleau.
For years I had planned to continue researching Louis Roy and the other artists of his circle. But reading here and there about Anna and her sisters reminded me of how it felt to begin work on Flowers and Fruit: a new landscape of possibility opened up. The story of how Rosa Bonheur's petticoat moved across the world captured my imagination.
As I begin this next project, I do not anticipate continuing to write regularly here. I will keep you occasionally updated. Wish me luck. Thank you for traveling this far.
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