Women were not expected to become creative artists, but to produce artwork as a constructive use of leisure time – to ornament their homes and to create gifts and portraits of family members. This interest in the picturesque dovetailed with a new emphasis on providing middle-class women with “accomplishments”, so that drawing joined embroidery and music as a requirement for girls of the aspiring classes. Even the poorer members of society might have one or two decorating their homes, and gift books full of romantic portraits, dramatic landscapes, and Biblical and literary scenes proliferated. These had been a popular art form since the late Middle Ages, but it was not until the early nineteenth-century that technological innovations made them available on a truly wide scale. What can they tell us about her life and the inspiration for her novels?Ĭharlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë were introduced to art in the same way as thousands of other middle-class Victorian women, through the copying of prints.
Today 180 original drawings can be attributed to Charlotte, and we have had the privilege obtain two of these for a client. “I have, in my day, wasted a certain quantity of Bristol board and drawing-paper, crayons and cakes of colour, but when I examine the contents of my portfolio now, it seems as if during the years it has been lying closed some fairy has changed what I once thought sterling coin into dry leaves, and I feel much inclined to consign the whole collection of drawings to the fire” ( Alexander and Sellars p.
The author’s modest response will be familiar to anyone who has in later life revisited the artistic output of their childhood and teenage years, wrote to Charlotte Brontë to request that she personally illustrate the second edition of Jane Eyre.
In 1848 the publishing firm Smith, Elder & Co.
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