Marie Laurencin: The Modern Portraits of the Brontes

This article examines Marie Laurencin's illustrations for Les Soeurs Bronte: Filles du Vent, Rene Crevel's booklet of 1930. In five colour lithographs, she brought up to date Bronte portraiture, re-envisioning the sisters as icons of modern urban femininity. The print set can be considered Laurencin's pictorial narratives on the sisters. It signifies the artist's revisionist approach to the myth of the Brontes as elemental Romantic geniuses in rural Yorkshire. Laurencin's exquisite, peculiarly feminized rendition of the sisters displaces them from their usual cult status, alluding to their potential interests and aspirations as ordinary women at a quotidian level. The evanescent, pastel-tinted images unsettle prevailing perceptions of the sisters, evoking the fundamental contingencies of the Bronte iconography. This body of graphic works claims a unique niche within the Bronte portrait canon.