Landscape with Deer

Rosa Bonheur's Landscape with Deer (1887) is a late work from the French animal painter whose depictions of cattle, horses, and deer had made her the most celebrated woman artist of the nineteenth century. Bonheur's deer subjects draw on the deep forest of Fontainebleau where she worked extensively, treating the deer with the combination of naturalistic observation and idealizing grandeur that characterized her major animal paintings. By 1887 she was in her sixties and had long established the Château de By near Fontainebleau as her studio, surrounded by live animals that she studied daily.

Bonheur renders the deer with the anatomical precision developed through decades of direct observation — her deer are among the most accurately depicted in nineteenth-century animal painting. The forest setting provides the natural habitat context within which the animals move with convincing ease. Her palette is warm and naturalistic for the forest deer subject — the warm browns of deer coat against the varied greens and ochres of forest vegetation, with the specific quality of Fontainebleau forest light filtered through the canopy.