The Brontes and the Visual Arts

~Rochelle Fri, Nov 21, 1997 (01:13) seed

The importance of the visual arts to the Brontes is very evident. Their paintings evolved alongside their literary skills, though never to the same heights. References to art are scattered through their novels (all save WH). The general interpretation runs like this: Branwell was talented and had the potential to make a career as a portrait artist - needless to say, he blew it. Charlotte would have liked a career as an artist - and I've wondered if perhaps this might be yet another clue to her dislike of her brother at the end of his life, when he had blown opportunities for training in the field that he had never had. Nevertheless, her appreciation for art and her enjoyment in it lasted all her life and is reflected in her writing. Emily used her own artistic capabilities as yet another way of appreciating the natural world (hence the number of drawings she did from life of scenes and animals). For Anne it was a usefull skill as a governess as well as an enjoyable activity. Were they great artists? No. They were competant, and might have been more so had it not been for the rigidly structured way art was taught. Witness here Charlotte's very pretty but utterly unoriginal copies of flowers. She was a girl, so it was mete for her to do floral art. Emily showed the most originality of the girls - through the pet portraits to that wonderful fir tree she gave to one of the students in Brussels. Compare Charlotte and Emily's drawings of the same subject. Some of Charlotte's criticisms of contemporary art in Villette reminded me of] simmiler criticisms the pre-Raphaelites were raising at the same time. Overly mannered, unnaturally lit scenes, with nothing of the natural world to them, if I remember correctly, were some of the issues she raised. The pre-Raphaelites first exhibited in 1848. While Charlotte had other things on her mind that year, does anyone know if she ever expressed an opinion on the school?

~SKAT Thu, Dec 25, 1997 (17:40) #1

Hi, Rochelle; as an artist I find this a rather interesting topic - funnily enough I've never actually given it a great deal of thought! For myself I don't find the few surviving works by Branwell particularly promising. Perhaps he drew better than he painted. But if you think about it, don't you also find that the Bront�s somehow lived in an entirely wrong era? I mean, just look at 19th century art - beautiful, but very 'strict'. Painters, more so than writers, probably, stuck to rules, painting flowers and portraits and so forth; anything more creative would have been regarded as rubbish, and its creators as talentless. And just th refore the Bront�s certainly had no chance of 'making' it as artists. They were all very competent draughtsmen, but if they had lived today, I think they would have been able to DO something with this talent. They were far too creative to stick to the rules of painting landscapes and portraits etc. successfully - perhaps that's why their drawings (mostly copied and not products of their imagination) seem good, but somehow unconvincing. Had they lived now, just think of the wonderful visual works they might have created with those vivid, strange imaginations!

~Rochelle Sun, Jan 4, 1998 (22:42) #2

Very valid points, Riette. I think at the very least Charlotte began to recognise how her art education had let her down - compare her attitude in JE to that in "Villette". Seen in a wider context, their artistic output is very simmiler to many other young Victorian women who had "mastered" art as an "accomplishment". They did, however, take it rather more seriously than many of their contempories...Anne made Helen, her major protagonist in TOWH an artist, and Charlotte discusses art at length in her novels, and apparently did so frequently in her correspondence and conversations. For Emily, as demonstrated in the number of works she produced "from life", her art was yet another way to respond to the natural world she so loved, like her literary works. I have a wonderful book entitled "The Art of the Brontes" which has plates of all their known work, as well as works it identifies as of dubious attribution. Seeing Branwell's works as a whole is helpful.

~amy2 Wed, Jan 7, 1998 (18:32) #3

I saw the original of the "Three Sisters" in the National Portrait Gallery in October. While it is stirring to see the original, I can tell you that as a painting, it isn't particularly good. I tend to think that Emily was a better artist than Branwell -- her watercolours of Keeper and Flossy are just wonderful (on display now at the Parsonage in Haworth). I also very much like Anne & Charlotte's pencil drawings. Having just seen the actual sites (the bridge at Thorp Green which Anne sketched and Roe H ad, which Charlotte captured) I really was able to appreciate the talent of the Brontes as artists. The sketches are unbelievably true to life and capture the locales beautifully, even to this day.