Exhibition: Sex, Drugs and Literature – The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë, Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth, until June 1 2011
If Branwell Brontë had been born in the 20th century, there's every chance he'd have been a cult figure. A prodigious painter and academic dismissed from separate tutor posts for fudging accounts and sleeping with his employer's wife, the brother of the famous Yorkshire literary siblings died from consumption and bronchitis at the age of 31, ravaged by opium and alcohol addiction.
The family may have had to bail their flawed wildchild out when his drink-driven debts saw him threatened with prison in 1846, but they actually owed him salvation for his impact on their work, a contribution which is usually overlooked in favour of his more salacious vices.
Branwell was a gifted portrait artist
He wrote prolifically with Charlotte and Emily in their youth, and was even considered to be the greatest talent of the bunch. It was his ability as a portrait painter, though, which shone brightest, an ambition he realised in Bradford before his promiscuity saw him dismissed in disgrace. His despair at being separated from the wife he had persuaded to betray a local Reverend drove him to his destructive demise.
Branwell's poetry, writing and art reveals a tortured, gifted soul, burdened by his position as the only male of his father's brood. Various secret drawings reveal saucy sketches of indecent scenes, and there are inferences to illegitimate offspring he may have fathered, as well as a string of disastrous affairs.
Manuscripts, correspondences and a letter to William Wordsworth (on special loan from The Wordsworth Trust) also feature in a display which will be introducing new objects during the course of its two year-run.
The artist worked with his better-known sisters during their childhood
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