When Queer Artists Go Missing

Rosa Bonheur and John Singer Sargent are being straight-washed by major museums

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Fourth Wave

8 min readApr 24, 2024

The Bathers by John Singer Sargent. (1917, via Wikimedia)

In the mid-1800s when trousers were banned for French women, celebrity animal painter Rosa Bonheur was granted a “pants permit.” According to The MET, which houses her award winning painting The Horse Fair, “For a year and a half Bonheur sketched there twice a week, dressing as a man to discourage attention.”

This strikes me as a funny sentence when Bonheur was also well-known to sport a men’s haircut, smoke cigars and boldly ride “unsupervised” in her carriage with the top down. She was best buds with Buffalo Bill Cody, enjoyed long-term, live-in relationships — and adjoined bedrooms — with other brilliant female painters whom she at various points referred to as “wife.” With Anna Klumpke, she envisioned a “divine marriage of two souls,” and of Nathalie Micas she once said: “Had I been a man, I would have married her . . . I would have had a family, with my children as heirs, and nobody would have any right to complain.” And although homosexuality was as illegal as lady pants, when probed on the subject of marriage by a slow-to-catch-on contemporary she famously stated: “As far as males go, I only like the bulls I paint.”

So yeah, “discouraging attention” on one hand — but waving a middle finger on the other? Either way, what a stud.

*Photo of Rosa Bonheur (right) with Natalie Micas in Nice, France (1882, via* *Wikimedia*)

But when I had the opportunity to visit Bonheur’s bicentenary at the Musée D’Orsay last year, I was shocked to find zero mention of her flagrant gender expression and hardly anything of her relationships.

Disappearing the “gay” from Bonheur’s legacy

The value of acknowledging these seems obvious to me. However, do the partners of hyper-famous artists need to be mentioned in their retrospectives? You could argue, no. But then female artists who have existed on the periphery of every major circle throughout history might be completely erased. And beyond that, Micas and Klumpke were important players in the history of Bonheur’s art. Micas assisted with many of her paintings, and Klumpke was her biographer and heir to her estate.

However, the D’Orsay opted for a tidier summary: “The preservation of [Bonheur’s] studio and archives is the result of the involvement of her ‘brush sister,’ the American painter Anna Klumpke, who lived at the Château de By during the last years of the artist’s life.”

This isn’t Victorian era France; in the 21st century, it shouldn’t be a stretch to acknowledge that such “sisters” were romantic partners — Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, Anne Lister ”Gentleman Jack” and Ann Walker, to name only the most iconic.

So at the very least, I’d say the D’Orsay’s missed a trick; but at very worst, I’d say they’re in danger of disappearing the “gay” from Bonheur’s legacy.

I set these concerns aside for a year, imagining a fiery board meeting pitting elderly conservative backers against their young socially liberal counterparts, and excusing all of them for falling short of a more honest and in-depth portrayal of Bonheur’s life — much less one as brave as she was in her lifetime.

Until Sargent and Fashion arrived at the Tate Britain last month.

Sargent’s queer life tucked away in fourth room

I was initially buoyed by this incredible Financial Times article, reminding the world that in 1928, Jacques-Émile Blanche called John Singer Sargent “notorious in Paris, and in Venice, positively scandalous. He was a frenzied bugger.” Charlie Porter does a brilliant job of exploring Sargent’s self-identified history as a “painter and dressmaker,” as well as the care he must have taken to cloak his personal life from the all-powerful on whom he made his living. Sargent left no correspondence or diaries enabling us to neatly confirm or deny his sexuality, much less articulate its relevance to his work.

At Sargent’s retrospective, as I scoured nearly 60 paintings and the beautiful artifacts featured in them, I found his sexuality to be omnipresent in spirit; but on the plaques, disappointingly absent.

*‘Vernon Lee’ by John Singer Sargent.* (1881, via Wikimedia) Note: ‘Vernon Lee’ is the pen name of Violet Paget.

Except for one. Tucked away in the fourth room, a miniature plaque suggests: “Listen to journalist and novelist Tom Crewe discuss Sargent’s work and queer Victorian life in 1890s London.” Note that it doesn’t say “Sargent’s queer life.” Follow the link and scroll down to Crewe’s paragraphs where he concedes,

“There are certainly strong hints in [Sargent’s] work and in his life and in his circle of friends that he might have been gay, or he was gay. As a painter with, we think, a hidden life and ambiguous sexuality he’s right at the centre of this story.”

Although Crewe heavily qualifies any Sargent-specific statements and skirts analyzing his art through a queer lens, he does make an important plea to acknowledge the hidden lives of supposedly queer Victorians in plain sight.

Should this check the box? Perhaps. But on that tucked-way mini plaque, I can’t help but think that “queer Victorian life” reads a bit like a trigger warning, and that its invitation to follow a QR code reads a bit like ambivalence — feel free to opt-into queer history . . . or not.

We live in a time when identifying “the male gaze” is as critical to our understanding of our social fabric — both past and present — as it is to acknowledging the burgeoning lenses of underrepresented global majorities and minorities. And we are rapidly agreeing that what is said by whom, and how, is utterly important in the making of art and culture.

So where is the gay gaze?

Conveniently missing. In 2017, the Tate Britain announced its new exhibition, Queer British Art, 1861–1967: “With paintings, drawings, personal photographs and film from artists such as John Singer Sargent, Dora Carrington, Duncan Grant and David Hockney the diversity of queer British art is celebrated as never before.”

And apparently never again. How is it that seven years ago, Sargent’s experience as a queer artist was celebratory, but today — at a major solo retrospective of his work by the same museum — it has vanished?

It’s not by accident. Run a Google search for ‘John Singer Sargent Tate Britain’ and you’ll see that the meta description for his biography page still references “his same-sex [relationships].” But click-in, and that once-vital detail has since disappeared from the biography itself.

What happened? As with the Bonheur exhibition, I’m again left imagining a fractured board . . . although this time, I worry it’s not as fractured as I’d hoped. Perhaps it’s just too easy when major museums like the D’Orsay and the Tate can pick and choose sanitized histories simply to avoid controversy—but they can because, at times, so did the artists themselves.

In defense of Bonheur and Sargent, survival was at stake. To secretly conduct their affairs and publicly suppress or disguise their feelings was essential for their mere ability to legally exist in society, forget thriving in its upper echelons as accomplished artists. But we shouldn’t afford the same pass to museums, nor to ourselves. We know that whatever was said in regards to homosexuality in the 1800s was prosecutable, therefore we must look to what was unsaid. Because it’s just irresponsible to ignore actions, context, and in these cases—the art itself.

We are rapidly agreeing that what is said by whom, and how, is utterly important in the making of art and culture.

Sargent didn’t leave behind an official document chronicling his “frenzied” buggery, but he did leave a series of sensual male nudes which Porter observes, “remained private until his death.” He also uniquely played with gender identity in his portraits; see his handsome picture of his friend Violet Paget — pseudonym Vernon Lee — who is vividly described by The Telegraph as “the radical lesbian writer who shook the art world.” Porter grounds us in the importance of such evidence, specifically pointing to Sargent’s creative direction in the realm of fashion:

“To understand the role of fashion in his public works, I believe that we should also consider the implications of clothing in the art he kept hidden. They might even give us insight into the complexity and repressions of the gay male experience around a century ago.”

Similarly, Bonheur’s animal paintings could be viewed as an escape from the trappings of hetero society, and a nostalgia for the simplicity of nature. Her salute to the harnessed strength and power of working cattle in Ploughing in the Nivernais, 1846 (Musée D’Orsay) could be regarded as an anthem to suppressed masculine ideals to which Bonheur herself possibly aspired. The painting is believed to have been inspired by the opening of George Sand’s 1846 novel, La Mare au Diable. Considering that Sand‘s lesbian tendencies were widely rumored in her day — which Bonheur was both likely aware of and also experienced herself — it seems increasingly ignorant to analyze the piece without being open to such context.

And yes, “brush sister,” was indeed coined by Bonheur to describe Klumpke. But years later, and with a decade of correspondence under their belts, Bonheur was willing to resign any romantic passion she might have felt to convince Klumpke to finally move in with her, reasoning that “Friendship . . . is better sometimes than passing love [. . .] Friendship of the soul may become a divine affection; it is superior to family relations, and such friendship will last beyond our earthly existence.” Again, it’s what’s left unsaid that fills in the blanks of this complex relationship.

But knowing whether the romances of Bonheur and Sargent were unrequited is not what’s important. And neither are demanding impossible documentation that would in modern times conveniently reassure our ideas of their sexualities and gender expressions. What’s absolutely essential is that the full identities of these artists — as characterized in their own words, as known in the context of the times in which they lived, and as expressed in their work — are not hidden away. Especially at retrospectives intended to celebrate not just their art, but their lives.

Let’s really look at Bonheur, Sargent, and numerous others who’ve brilliantly impacted our culture throughout history. Perhaps in being unafraid to see them, we’ll be less afraid to see ourselves.

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Sources:

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When Queer Artists Go Missing

Rosa Bonheur and John Singer Sargent are being straight-washed by major museums

Disappearing the “gay” from Bonheur’s legacy

Sargent’s queer life tucked away in fourth room

Sources:

Written by Chelsea Monrania