Branwell Bronte

Branwell Bronte was the one the family expected everything from, and he painted himself out of the only picture of the four of them that survives. He was the third child and only son, taught at home by his father, and treated from childhood as the genius of the household - he read Greek and Latin, wrote the Angrian saga with Charlotte, painted in oils, and played the organ. The plan was the Royal Academy schools; he went to London in 1835 and appears never to have presented himself, returning with the money spent and no explanation that anyone recorded. He set up as a portrait painter in Bradford and failed, worked as a railway clerk at Luddenden Foot and was dismissed over a shortfall in the accounts, then took a tutoring post at Thorp Green where his sister Anne was governess. There he began an affair with his employer's wife, Lydia Robinson, and was sent away in 1845 in disgrace. The last three years were opium, drink and debt, with his sisters publishing around him under false names while he did not know. He died of tuberculosis in September 1848, aged thirty-one, three months before Emily. The group portrait he painted of his three sisters around 1834 hangs in the National Portrait Gallery with a painted-out pillar where he had put himself; the ghost of his figure has come back through the paint over time. It is the only group likeness of the sisters that exists. He wrote and published poems in local newspapers under the name Northangerland, which is more than Emily or Anne managed in their lifetimes outside the joint volume. His father sat up with him at the end. Charlotte wrote afterwards that she had hoped to the last and that the hope was gone.

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