Bonheur’s retrospective, recently on view at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux and opening this week at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, makes plain that her resplendent paintings would not be what they are had she not had close relationships with her subjects. The artist spent much of her time communing with and caring for other species: she adopted lions, gazelles, parrots, and countless other creatures, housing them in her Bordeaux menagerie. Not content simply to paint them from a distance or rely on eyesight alone, she learned their ways. In the show, her undated studies of big cats are arranged in a progression that first shows them sleeping, then eating and hunting. They record her growing comfort with the animals’ ferocity, an experience she also describes in her autobiography. In a few of these sketches, the draftswoman’s proportions are uncharacteristically wonky, recalling how she wrote about faltering humbly when attempting to capture such regal creatures. Her subjects seldom sat still—and, in some cases, were capable of devouring her.