Nathalie Micas

Jeanne Sarah Nathalie Micas (24 April 1824 – 21 June 1889) was a French painter and inventor of an efficient brake for trains. She lived with artist Rosa Bonheur for 40 years.

Biography Jeanne Sarah Nathalie Micas was born in Paris, the daughter of Louis Frédéric Micas, typographer, and Henriette Briolles.

In 1836, at the age of 12, she met Rosa Bonheur, aged 14. Bonheur's father painted Micas's portrait in 1837, and the two girls "became immediately close, soon deciding to spend their lives together." Like Bonheur, Micas obtained a cross-dressing permit giving her official authorization to wear trousers. Since an order dating from November 1800, all women of the time were required to request this permission, renewable every six months, from the Paris prefecture, to wear trousers so they could move around the places where they worked. The Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux and the National Gallery, London, list Bonheur and Micas as co-creators of the piece, which hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

In 1860, Micas settled with her mother, Bonheur and many animals at the Château de By, in Thomery.

She died at the Château de By in Thomery (Seine-et-Marne) on 21 June 1889. The painter Charles Bourdon, her friend, was a witness to the death for the civil registry. She was buried on 24 June at the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris with Rosa Bonheur and Bonheur's biographer Anna Elizabeth Klumpke. Their combined tomb reads, "Friendship is divine affection."