Letters to Rosa B.

PUBLICATION SEPTEMBER 2022

Rosa Bonheur is an animal painter who knew in the XIX^e century an international success; she was thus one of the most famous artists of her century. The first woman artist to receive the Legion of Honor and gradually forgotten in history, she is emerging from the shadows today, the year 2022 marking her bicentenary.  

Photographer and sociologist, Irène Jonas stayed in the Château de Rosa Bonheur to capture the atmosphere of the place. In addition to her work of painted photographs, she imagined a correspondence with the great artist; eight letters addressing the emblematic subjects that appeared during the various readings on his life.

To walk in the park is to imagine Rosa B. coming and going between the different enclosures that housed domestic and wild animals so that she could draw them. To enter his studio is to enter this silent and secret lair while dreaming of discovering part of the mystery of the magical transformation of the white canvas into a painting, and of seizing the impalpable through the shots.

Irène Jonas is a photographer and sociologist. She lives in Paris and Guilvinec, in southern Finistère. She has been part of the Revealing Agency since 2016. Through her professions as a sociologist and photographer, writing and images have always been present in her professional life. However, she has freed herself from sociological writing and photographic reporting, in order to develop a form of personal expression. For the past ten years, she has focused her personal and artistic research on visual photography. 

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124 pages
± 60 photographs
Soft cover and flaps
Size: 220 x 190mm
ISBN: 978-2-36510-108-0