PBA Galleries

4 pp. in French and English. 5x6½". Written from 12 Rue Rosa Bonheur, By-Thomery, France. With original mailing envelope.

To poet Edouard Romilly, Paris. Klumpke thanks Romily for his “delicat souvenir”, a copy of his book, “Reves et Realites”. She had sent another of his books of poetry to her Boston friend and patron, “Madame Hill” [probably her patroness Mary Hill Coolidge) who had responded in English, with thanks for a gift which “has touched me so tenderly, with tokens of your loving thought between its pages…I have been lying on the sofa before the wood fire reading the beautiful poems with great enjoyment and drinking in the spirit of courage and strength with which they are filled… I am sure they will be a comfort and help to all who read them as carefully as they deserve.” Born in San Francisco in 1856, daughter of a wealthy realtor, Anna Elizabeth Klumpke and her sisters were taken by their mother to Europe, where at age 33, after studying art in Paris, Anna met and fell in love with 67 year-old Rosa Bonheur, perhaps the most famous woman artist of the 19th century. They lived together for ten years, while Klumpke pursued her own artistic career. She becoming Bonheur’s official portraitist (one of her 3 paintings of the artist is now at the Metropolitan Museum), biographer and, after Bonheur’s death, her sole heir. She wrote this letter while still living in the home she had shared with Bonheur south of Paris. Klumpke later returned to her native San Francisco, where she wrote her own autobiography and died during World War II. An inscribed copy of Klumpke’s 1908 biography of Bonheur sold in these galleries in 2000, but no letter of Klumpke’s has appeared at American auction in the past 35 years.