Found: The ‘Lost’ Portrait of Emily Brontë

Abstract

An illustration in The Woman at Home (1894), captioned ‘EMILY BRONTË. From a painting by Charlotte Brontë, hitherto unpublished’, matches an unsigned portrait, recently found in a private collection. The illustration was copied from the portrait of Emily Brontë that was seen in Haworth in 1879 by William Robertson Nicoll (1851–1923), owner and editor of The Woman at Home. A pencilled inscription on the back of the newly found portrait, apparently in Charlotte’s handwriting, reads: ‘Emily Brontë / Sister of Charlotte Bro[nté] / Currer Bell’. In 1908 Nicoll declared in an article that the original portrait had become ‘irrevocably lost’. This article proposes that it has been found. The painter is identified here as the Bradford portrait artist, John Hunter Thompson (1808–90).