The Bronte Sisters
Patrick Branwell Bronte (1817 to 1848) · About 1834
Three young women sit close together against a dark background: Anne on the left, Emily in the middle and Charlotte on the right. Between Emily and Charlotte is a pale, ghostly column. Their brother Branwell painted himself there and then painted himself out, perhaps because the composition was too crowded, and over time his figure has begun to show through the thin paint. It is the only surviving group portrait of the sisters who wrote Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
Branwell was about seventeen and hoping to become a professional painter. The drawing is awkward, the hands are unfinished and the faces are stiff, but the likenesses were confirmed by people who knew the family. Look at Emily, the tallest and most withdrawn, with her long face and steady gaze, and at Charlotte, who later became famous and whose small, determined features match descriptions of her. The canvas is creased across the middle because it spent decades folded.
After Charlotte's death her husband Arthur Bell Nicholls took the painting to Ireland, where it lay folded on top of a wardrobe. His widow found it in nineteen fourteen and it was bought for the gallery soon after. It is damaged, amateurish and unfinished, and it is also one of the most loved objects in the building, because it shows the three sisters as their brother saw them at home in Haworth, before any of them had published a word.
Did You Know? Branwell painted himself between his sisters and then covered his own figure with a column; his ghostly outline is slowly reappearing as the paint thins.
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