Rare Watercolor by ‘Wuthering Heights’ Author Emily Brontë Will Go on Public Display for the First Time “The North Wind,” painted while Emily and her sister Charlotte were studying in Belgium, is now heading to the Brontë family home in Yorkshire The North Wind, Emily Brontë, 1842 Forum Auctions A rare painting by Emily Brontë, the British author best known for her 1847 novel Wuthering Heights, has sold at auction for $42,000. The Brontë Parsonage Museum, located in the Brontë family home in Haworth, Yorkshire, recently placed the winning bid on the watercolor painting known as The North Wind (1842). Following restoration work, it will go on public view at the site where the Brontë sisters—Emily, Charlotte and Anne—created some of 19th-century England’s greatest literary works. While Wuthering Heights’ influence on literature, film and even music is evident, Emily’s works of visual art are exceedingly elusive. “Emily is probably the most enigmatic of the Brontës,” Ann Dinsdale, the principal curator at the museum, tells Artnet’s Jo Lawson-Tancred. “She died at the age of 30, and very few manuscripts or letters by her have survived. It’s extremely rare to see anything associated with Emily coming on the market, making this painting of great importance.” The North Wind is a fittingly enigmatic work. It depicts a windswept woman with dark hair and a light blue cloak facing away from a breeze. Brontë painted The North Wind while staying with her sister Charlotte at the Pensionnat Heger, a boarding school for girls in Belgium, according to a statement from the Brontë Parsonage Museum. Emily Brontë's painting was based on an engraving of Lady Charlotte Harley that accompanied a collection of Lord Byron's works. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons The work is based on an engraving of Lady Charlotte Mary Harley that accompanied an edition of Finden’s Illustrations of the Life and Works of Lord Byron. As Dinsdale sees it, Emily drawing on a Byronic image is fitting for her development as an artist and writer. “Most writers on the Brontës would agree that Byron was probably the greatest literary influence on Emily’s work,” she says to Artnet. As far as the painting’s title, Emily appears to have been inspired by her younger sister Anne, who wrote a poem by the same name in 1838 in which “a captive girl welcomes the cold because it reminds her of her native northern mountains,” Edith Weir wrote in a 1949 volume of the journal Brontë Society Transactions, per the auction catalog. In letters, Charlotte wrote that Emily was taking drawing lessons and left some of her work in Brussels after the girls returned to England, according to the museum’s statement. For more than 180 years after the watercolor was completed, The North Wind passed between private hands. As a result, Emily’s visual artwork remains underappreciated, particularly when compared to that of her siblings. Her brother, Branwell, painted the only surviving portrait of his three sisters, which now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London, and Charlotte illustrated the second edition of her 1847 novel Jane Eyre. Branwell Brontë painted his three sisters—Anne, Emily and Charlotte—around 1834. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons “Unlike Charlotte and Branwell, Emily left few drafts, few exercises, to tell the story of her apprenticeship in painting,” Christine Alexander and Jane Sellars wrote in their 1995 book The Art of the Brontës, per the auction catalog. “Her drawings and rough sketches are as fragmentary, and as elusive of interpretation, as her surviving poetry.” Because Emily’s artworks are so rare, the auction house used “equivalent drawings by her sister Charlotte” to decide on an estimate, Rupert Powell, Forum Auction’s deputy chairman, tells Artnet. Experts expected the painting, which is lightly tarnished with spotting and some abrasions, to sell for around $26,000. “It was very tense when lot 53, Emily Brontë’s painting, came up, as the likelihood was that it would disappear into a private collection,” Dinsdale says to Artnet. During the auction, the price rose far beyond the estimate. But the Brontë Parsonage Museum was determined to finally bring The North Wind to Haworth—and to public display—for the first time. “The bidding seemed to go up very fast. Then there was a very tense pause before the gavel came down, and I knew that the painting would be coming to the Brontës’ former home in Haworth,” Dinsdale adds. “It was a very emotional moment for staff at the museum.” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.