I had to laugh, running through my facebook page earlier today. I had posted previously a message the included the name “Trump”. To my amusement the system had automatically “corrected” it to “trim”. Has he disappeared from history to such a complete extent already that his name no longer appears to be recognised as a legitimate word? It does seem appropriate that he has been “trimmed”, at last.
On a more serious note, however, I came across an interesting piece this afternoon in the London Review of Books, while enjoying my afternoon cup of tea in the studio. It was a review of a new biography that has just appeared of Rosa Bonheur. No: I had never heard of her before either, but at her death in 1900 her paintings were selling for more than a million francs each. She had an enormous reputation, as witnessed by the fact that examples of her work are on only contained in major French museums but also in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the National Gallery in London.
In some ways her pictures remind me of Elizabeth Butler (famed principally, I suppose for her Charge of the Light Brigade) in their epic quality. She also called to mind some of the great Russian landscape artists, such as Isaak Levitan or Arkhip Kuindzhi. Clearly Bonheur was a painter of great stature, and certainly doesn’t merit the situation of obscurity into which it has fallen.
I wonder if I will ever get to the National Gallery again, to check her out. Not this year, it seems.