ADVERTISEMENTA rare painting by the English writer Emily Brontë (1818 – 1848) has been purchased for £32,000 (€37,034) by the Brontë Parsonage Museum at auction.
The piece was offered by Forum Auctions at a presale estimate of £20,000 (€23,152) and eventually went to the museum after a bidding war.
Manuscripts by the Brontë sisters – writers Charlotte, Emily and Anne – often go up for sale but pictural artworks are more uncommon.
“It was very tense when lot 53, Emily Brontë’s painting, came up, as the likelihood was that it would disappear into a private collection,” the Brontë Parsonage Museum’s principal curator Ann Dinsdale told Artnet.
“The bidding seemed to go up very fast, then there was a very tense pause before the gavel came down and I knew that the painting would be coming to the Brontës’ former home in Haworth. It was a very emotional moment for staff at the museum.”
The watercolour, titled ‘The North Wind’, is a portrait of a young woman with brown, wind-swept hair wearing a white dress and a blue cloak. It is a copy of an engraving by William Finden, which appeared his 1833 «Illustrations of the Life and Works of Lord Byron.»
Emily Brontë completed this artwork in 1842, when she was around 24 years old and studying in Brussels with her sister Charlotte, the author of “Jane Eyre.”
Charlotte’s letters mention that Emily had taken drawing lessons while in Belgium and is likely to have left behind some of her work when she returned to England.
According to the auction catalogue, ‘The North Wind’ was probably retained by Constantin Héger, who ran the boarding school where the Brontë sisters studied, and possibly passed the artwork to his descendants.
Apart from her celebrated Victorian novel “Wuthering Heights”, few of Emily Brontë’s pieces survive. Her pictural work is particularly unknown.
“Unlike Charlotte and Branwell, Emily left few drafts, few exercises, to tell the story of her apprenticeship in painting”, Jane Sellars and Christine Alexander wrote in their 1995 book “The Art of the Brontës.”
“Her drawings and rough sketches are as fragmentary, and as elusive of interpretation, as her surviving poetry… Judging by surviving examples, Emily made fewer copies of engravings than her siblings.”
Among the Brontë siblings, Branwell was especially known for his paintings and produced many of the surviving images of his sisters.
Emily Brontë’s watercolour will be assessed by a conservator and is then expected to go on permanent public display at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in West Yorkshire.
Additional sources • Artnet
