Queer Aesthetics and Its Others: Human Autonomy and Nonhuman Subjugation in the Passy Cravat (1864)

In 1864, four French artists—Nathalie Micas, Rosa Bonheur, Isidore Bonheur, and Paul Chardin—gathered at Rosa Bonheur’s château in By-Thomery, a hamlet adjacent to the Fontainebleau forest. At the château’s main studio, the community members—connected through romance, blood, and friendship—crafted the Passy Cravat, or Parody of By’s Inhabitants, an experimental multi-media work in gouache, ink, and black pencil on canvas. In 1860, Rosa Bonheur, a celebrated animal painter, and Nathalie Micas, an amateur painter, engineer, and medical practitioner, moved to By from Paris with Micas’s mother and a menagerie of nonhuman animals used as pets and artist models. Red bands divide the Passy Cravat into rhombuses and triangles, each constituting a space on the estate, which the artists filled with irreverent caricatures of By’s human and nonhuman residents. This paper argues that the Passy Cravat, a work that has thus far been overlooked by art historians, is a prime example of nineteenth-century queer aesthetics because it constitutes a historically specific movement away from institutional classifications of genre and medium by a community that tinkered with the limitations of heteronormative life. The paper contends that queer aesthetics in the Passy Cravat are reliant upon the artists’ approaches to citizenship and human–animal relations. Ultimately, the Passy Cravat reveals By-Thomery to be a messy nexus of human autonomy and nonhuman subjugation bound to conceptions of belonging in the Second Empire (1852–1870).