Bovine Reproductions: Animal Husbandry and Acclimatization in the Cattle Paintings and Prints of Rosa Bonheur

Abstract

The mutability and physical perfectibility of animal bodies was a scientific and aesthetic preoccupation in nineteenth-century France, channelling anxieties about class, race and national identity into projects of breeding domestic animals. This essay explores how the animal painter Rosa Bonheur figured an imagined agricultural superabundance through depictions of both European and ‘exotic' imported bovines. The cattle that so often functioned throughout art history as illustrated zoological specimens or landscape staffage emerge in these portrayals as central protagonists rich in fur, fat, and muscular force. The seemingly anodyne cow thereby became symbolically charged, associated with both capitalist modernization and pastoral idyll.