This is the tenth post in the NiCHE series Animal Encounters, edited by Heather Green and Caroline Abbott. You can read all posts in this series here.
The summer after my dissertation prospectus defense, I returned to the drawing board. My initial project proposal, which examined relationships between women and animals, was too encyclopedic, too focused on cats and dogs and birds and finding as many examples of each kind of work as possible, without considering the nature of the relationship. Spend time looking at images and thinking about what is exciting about them, my supervisor told me. Let the objects guide you. Determined to stick with the original desire to focus on the animal, some choices remained obvious to preserve in the dissertation, such as the famed 19th century animal painter Rosa Bonheur, who has been the subject of renewed scholarly interest in recent years in light of the bicentennial of her birth in 2022. In most other cases, the animals remained elusive, white rabbits living on the edges of my mind in the form of questions rather than bodies, let alone names. How does one follow an animal through the archive without knowing which animal or which archive that is?
As I entered the château that Bonheur called her home and atelier in the small town of Thomery one cold December day, I had a distinct feeling that the heart and soul of the old building belonged to an Animal.1 My hunch was confirmed only an hour later, while discussing my dissertation Katherine Brault, the director of the château-turned-museum, and her daughter, Lou. As I did so, a grey cat with no tail named Crunch curled up in my lap and went to sleep (Figure 1). Crunch is one of eight feline residents living at the château, allowed to come and go largely as they please (with some exceptions). During my visit, a particularly bold black cat was chased around the tearoom by staff, who explained that he tended to make himself at home in the kitchen and other less-opportune parts of the château.
These eight felines are only the most recent animal inhabitants of the château. Bonheur was fascinated by animals for both professional and personal reasons. As well as being the most common subject of her paintings and drawings, Bonheur was herself an animal lover. The histories of the animals she kept are among the rarer cases in animal history where privileged animals have managed to keep the names by which they were referred intact. Some of Rosa’s favourite “companion species,” to use the term coined by Donna Haraway, include a monkey named Kiki, the lions Sultan and Nero, the lioness Fatma, a stag named Jacques, the horses Panthère and Margot, and dogs Gamine, Daisy, and Charley. The latter remains immortalized in several of Bonheur’s portraits, which was executed by her companion Ann Klumpke. One such painting in the château, member of staff told me, was made on Bonheur’s condition that Charley also be in the painting. Portraits of Bonheur frequently depict her with animals, whether living or, more often, painterly, emphasizing her role as an artist by situating her next to paintings-in-progress (Figure 2). Further manifestations of Rosa Bonheur’s relationships with her animal companions are everywhere at the chateau: among them, Fatma’s skin remains in Bonheur’s atelier to this day. Placed between two aisles, seeing her skin is a surprise even for those who might come to the château knowing it is there (Figure 3). The wrinkled quality makes the skin look like a piece of paper that got soaked and warped, transforming from an animal body into an animal object.
Despite this visibility, details about Bonheur’s animals remain hard to come by, in part because of the state of the her archive, also held by the château.2 Importantly, the history of Bonheur’s animals demonstrates that “companion species,” those beings whose relationships with humans are grounded in reciprocity rather than linear relations of power, are more often the ones who are allowed to retain their human-given names.3 In other words, human-animal relationships based in intimacy tend to be more readily documented. When the animal is given a name and treated as a participant, it is recognized as an agential being, with its own interiority and desires that it is capable of acting upon, with something to both give and take.
Emotional proximity to privileged historical figures has been another significant factor that determines to what extent details of an animal’s life are recorded. Monarchs are one such category of figure — many of Queen Victoria’s animal companions have retained their names in the written records. Beginning with her first pet, the King Charles spaniel named Dash, Victoria had an array of animals over the course of her life, their names preserved in letters sent to relatives, photographic albums depicting the dogs in the Windsor kennels, and portraits proclaiming the names of their animal sitters. This is a stark contrast to the exotic animals Victoria received as gifts from various dignitaries or groups, which are identified only by species and by their quantity.4 One of the few exceptions was Gabbas, a Pyrenean dog gifted to Victoria by King Louis-Philippe of France in December of 1844. Although immortalized in paint by Thomas Musgrave Joy (Figure 4), one of several animal painters employed by the Queen, he ended up being given to the Zoological Society of London after biting Victoria on the arm. The event became public news, emphasizing that “the dog was commanded to be send away, but not to be destroyed”, a wording that suggests Gabbas was closer to property, or a (so-called) specimen, than to being a companion species.5
Naming is a contentious act to many who study animal history and can be read as a way of exerting power over animals.6 At the core of this philosophy is a necessary recognition that a name is granted to an animal by a human, even if the goal is to establish a more intimate, even familial, relation. The power dynamic this reflects is especially palpable (and all the more contentious) with scientific names. The Linnaean system has been reassessed in recent years for its colonial context: it was designed with the goal of streamlining and classifying, organizing and making sense, and which ultimately facilitated the exertion of colonial power over living things and reducing them to a resource that is either useful or harmful to humans. Far from Victoria’s lavish sitting rooms and the corners of Rosa’s château, zoological drawings are thus markedly different from animal paintings, their subjects identified by their species rather than by name. The difference is function: for the specimen animal, utility to the imperial cause, whether that be an institution or an individual, is prioritized over the human-animal relations at play.
In the archives of Paris, while searching for information on the painter Pauline Knip, née de Courcelles, who today is best known for contributing illustrations to a volume on pigeons (Figure 5), I first came across papers detailing the commission she undertook for the Sèvres porcelain manufactory from 1817 to 1826 The result was a set of plates depicting the birds of South America, all executed with great attention to realism and ornithological accuracy.7 The fifty-one birds selected for the plates are listed by their scientific names, with notes next to them about how many colours are needed for their execution. The column furthest to the right indicates the sketches have been approved and signed off on.8 As was the case with Bonheur, the Sèvres archives were mute on the question of whether Knip’s avian subjects were dead or alive or even what proximity Knip had to these animal bodies. Given the scarcity of sources of female zoological artists and the fact that few had the ability to travel to see their animal subjects first-hand the way Elizabeth Gould did, it is fair to assume that the birds on Knip’s plates would have already been dead when the artist studied them in Paris. The entire process feels clinical to read about. The birds themselves are largely absent from the numerous papers detailing Knip’s battle with the director, Alexandre Brogniard, the majority of them detailing her concerns with the manufacturing process and the pay. Those details about the birds that have survived concern the designs themselves. In them, the birds become pigments, while their brilliant colours are of importance primarily to determine what kind of background would bring them out best. According to Knip, the answer was blue, although the surviving plates in the Sèvres collection suggest she may have lost the battle.9
What does it mean to write an animal history or, as Éric Baratay calls them, “animal biographies?” Baratay defines the latter as an account of animal lives that considers “the experience of feelings”, therefore “lend[ing] the animal its subjectivity and put[ting] I forth as a subject.”10 Such approaches have been contested by some animal studies scholars, with some even turning away from the discipline out of concern that one can only ever “speak for” the animal. It is true that we will never fully know what animals felt when they were brought from afar to become close companions to human beings or how these relations shaped their well-being.11 We will never live their experience. Yet their absence becomes a detail that, like their very presence in a work of art, can be noted. For those not afraid of being accused of being bad historians, this absence may even become material to be used, to engage in what Haraway calls “speculative fabulation” rather than a vacuous hole to step around.12 The fact remains, however, that emotional importance is at once a currency and a form of kinship that separates animals who are immortalized through names (and the visual and textual representations that contain them), from those animals who have been denied the privilege of individuality in captivity, confined to a life as a number and member of a species whose subjecthood is not fully denied but also never fully embraced.
Notes
[1] The A is capitalized here in brief objection to Derrida’s opposition to all living beings being consolidated under the single, capital-A term. For more on the topic, see Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)”, in The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Mari-Louise Mallet (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 31.
[2] For a concise discussion of Bonheur’s animals, both exotic and domestic, see Léa Rebsamen, “Rosa Bonheur, Artiste Animalière au XIXème siècle” (PhD diss., Ecole Nationale Vétérinaire d’Alfort, 2013), 24-28.
[3] For more on Donna Haraway’s definition of companion species, see The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003) and “When Species Meet: Introduction”, in When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 3-44.
[4] Archival examples from the Royal Archives at Windsor include MEWS/MAIN1/5/271-272, a document that mentions some animals that sailed on a ship from the Gulf of Tunis to England in May 1846, and two instances where kangaroos were gifted to the Queen that are discussed in PPTO/PP/QV/MAIN/1897/20450 and PPTO/PP/QV/MAIN/1897/20548.
[5] “Her Majesty Bitten by a Dog.” The Leeds Times (January 8, 1848): 3.
[6] For an Indigenous perspective on naming as a way of establishing multispecies relations, see Winona LaDuke, Recovering the Sacred: The Power of Naming and Claiming (Cambridge: South End Press, 2005) and Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013).
[7] The set of plates designed and illustrated by Knip was produced at the tail end of what was a fashion for tableware depicting subjects from natural history texts such as the Comte de Buffon’s Ornithologie. For more on this history, see Sylvie Legrand-Rossi, Les Services ‘aux Oiseaux Buffon’ du Comte Moïse de Camondo: Une encyclopédie de porcelain (Montreuil: Gourcuff Gradenigo, 2016).
[8] Folder Pb 5 L2 (1), Archives de la Manufacture Nationale de Sèvres.
[9] Folder Cote Ob 3, Archives de la Manufacture Nationale de Sèvres.
[10] Éric Baratay, Animal Biographies: Towards a History of Individuals, trans. Lindsay Turner (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2022), 14.
[11] For more on why it is impossible to fully comprehend the animal experience, see Thomas Nagel, “Wat is it Like to Be a Bat?”, The Philosophical Review 83, no. 1 (1974): 435-450.
[12] For more on Haraway’s definition of the term as well as a practical application of it, see Staying with the Trouble: making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 134-168.
Feature Image: “n222_w1150” by BioDivLibrary is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0.
Margaryta Golovchenko
Latest posts by Margaryta Golovchenko (see all)
- The Search for the Animal Corpus - November 22, 2024