Charlotte’s Copies of Emily Brontë’s ‘Bonnet’ Portrait

Abstract

This article introduces two newly found portrait studies, both copied from the watercolour portrait of a bonneted young lady in outdoor costume of the years 1838–40, known informally as the ‘Bonnet’ portrait of Emily Brontë. In a handwriting resembling Charlotte’s, an inscription on the back of the ‘Bonnet’ portrait names the sitter as ‘Emily Bronté | Sister of Charlotte Bronté | Currer Bell’. A newly found pencil copy of the ‘Bonnet’ portrait names the sitter as ‘Emily’, and is signed ‘CB’. This picture matches William Robertson Nicoll’s description of Charlotte’s pencil portrait of Emily, seen during his visit to Haworth in 1879. In addition, an unsigned, red Conté crayon copy of the ‘Bonnet’ portrait has recently been found at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth. Reproduced photographically and captioned ‘EMILY Brontë from a painting by Charlotte Bronte, hitherto unpublished’, this picture illustrated Frederika Macdonald’s article ‘The Brontës at Brussels’, in The Woman at Home for July 1894. The Conté crayon copy negates Clement Shorter’s undocumented surmise that Frederika had taken her illustration from a women’s fashion periodical. This article concludes that the pencil and Conté crayon copies identify the watercolour ‘Bonnet’ portrait as a likeness of Emily Brontë.