Branwell Bronte's Family Portraits: Motives, Influences, and Legacy

This essay explores the contemporary perception of Branwell Bronte's portraits of his literary sisters. It examines his motivation for portraying his sisters Charlotte, Emily, and Anne as members of a leisured social class to which in reality they did not belong. Through an examination of the influence of British portrait painters of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, such as Lawrence, Reynolds and Romney, I analyse the pictorial structure of Branwell's famous portraits. I also consider the physical nature of the works themselves, and offer a theory as to why we regard the paintings as icons, in the truest sense of the word.