THE HÉGER PORTRAIT OF CHARLOTTE BRONTË IN THE NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY.
Reading edition
The Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery, London, purchased in July 1906, a hitherto unheard of portrait of Charlotte Brontë, painted in water-colours in 1850, and stated to be by M. Héger. A reproduction of the portrait was given in The Cornhill Magazine for October 1906, Mr. Reginald J. Smith, K.C., of Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co., the Brontë publishers, having to do with its discovery.
In the early autumn of 1906, Mr. Lionel Cust, M.V.O., Surveyor of the King's Pictures and Works of Art, then Director of the National Portrait Gallery, was busily corresponding with me in regard to this portrait of Charlotte Brontë, the authenticity of which became sensationally attacked. At once I pointed out the importance and significance of the portrait's being signed "Paul Héger," instead of "Constantin Héger"; and other matters. In March 1907, I appended a footnote[95] to my article, "The Lifting of the Brontë Veil," in The Fortnightly Review, and on May 16th, 1907, the literary editor of The Tribune, Mr. E. G. Hawke, having placed space at my disposal, I wrote as follows:—
CHARLOTTE BRONTË.
THE HÉGER PORTRAIT.
To the Editor of The Tribune.
Sir,—As the water-colour drawing by M. Héger is now a valuable property of the nation, and gives a more intimately faithful and characteristic likeness of Charlotte Brontë than the Richmond portrait of "Currer Bell," now also hung in the National Portrait Gallery, kindly permit me publicly to present some of the many interesting facts connected with it. The portrait is signed "Paul Héger, 1850" (the accent is correct), and it represents Miss Brontë with curls, and reading Shirley, on one leaf of which is a heart transfixed with an arrow. The dress that she wears is light green, and on the back of the drawing is inscribed:
The Wearin' of the Green; First since Emily's death; that being the first occasion on which Miss Brontë wore colours after the death of her sister.
And below:
This drawing is by P. Hegér (accent thus), done from life in 1850. The pose was suggested first by a sketch done by her brother Branwell many years previous.
The Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery acquired the portrait from a lady whose family obtained it nigh on forty years ago from Mr. Thomas Baylis, a personal friend of Lord Lytton. Mr. Baylis stated that he himself had acquired the portrait from the Héger family at Brussels. The children of the Mme. Héger who refused to see Mrs. Gaskell because of her dislike to Miss Brontë, aver that M. Héger never drew or painted. The statement, however, is directly opposed by indisputable evidence:
(1.) The portrait is authentic, and was drawn from life in 1850, and the inscriptions that it bears it is proved could have been inspired by none other than Charlotte Brontë herself or M. Héger.
(2.) The statement of Mr. Thomas Baylis, a well-connected gentleman.
(3.) Eugène Sue, in his 1851 volume of Miss Mary ou l'Institutrice, gives, with a clouding of mystery, a lover—Gérard de Morville—drawing a portrait of Miss Mary "d'après nature;" and M. Sue's feuilleton, as I showed in The Fortnightly Review for March, identifies Miss Mary and the de Morvilles as phases of Charlotte Brontë and the Hégers.[96]
(4.) Miss Brontë, in Shirley, herself presents M. Héger—Louis Gérard Moore—as an artist, and refers to past drawing episodes.[97]
The authenticity of the inscriptions is not involved in the question as to whether Charlotte Brontë would use careless spelling, for, if she had written them, couching them in the third person, it is clear that she had not desired to be known as the writer. Upon the other hand, it is discovered to be utterly impossible for any one but Charlotte Brontë or M. Héger to have inspired the inscriptions, whosoever wrote them.
Significant Pieces of Evidence.
I find that M. Héger was Paul to none but Charlotte Brontë in 1850, and that before the publication, two years ago, of Charlotte Brontë and Her Sisters, by Mr. Clement Shorter, who, for reasons which he should explain, calls M. Constantin Gilles Romain Héger "M. Paul Héger," [Throughout that writer's correspondence in The Times, etc., and in Charlotte Brontë and Her Sisters: beneath the portrait of M. Héger, facing page 198, and bearing the inscription:—M. Paul Héger: The Hero of Villette and The Professor; and on page 161 of that work] no reference in print had been made to M. Héger but as Constantin. The Hégers state that M. Héger was not called Paul, and that Dr. Paul Héger, his son, was the first member of the family named Paul.
A native of Haworth[98] who lived from 1830 till after the death of Charlotte Brontë in 1855, "within twenty yards of the Haworth Parsonage," her home, has pronounced the Héger portrait of Miss Brontë to be a correct likeness and "just like her." He says that it reminds him of her as he knew her and as she was in her younger days, and he pointed out to me particularly that he had seen her with her hair as in the Héger likeness, "scores of times before she went away"—this giving the clue to the reference in the inscription to a pose in a portrait by Branwell "many years previous" to 1850; and I have seen a reproduction of a sketch by Branwell wherein the Brontë sisters have curls. Moreover, I find that Miss Brontë really liked curls and disliked the other styles, though she conformed to the fashion.
I also find that the paper on which the Héger portrait of Miss Brontë was drawn was that used in 1850 by the house where she was a guest in London in the early June of 1850, at the very time to within a day when, as there is indisputable evidence—despite assertions that she "never under any circumstances during the later period of her life wore a green dress"—Charlotte Brontë was wearing a light green dress. That was "the first occasion on which Miss Brontë wore colours," as the inscription tells us, and fact substantiates, after she had concluded the remarkably long mourning period for her sisters, which began with "the death of Emily" and did not end till twelve months after the death of Anne, who died on May 28th, 1849.
(Signed) J. MALHAM-DEMBLEBY.
Scarr Hill, Eccleshill, Bradford, May 16th, 1907.
The publication of this letter ended the controversy.[99] Since it was published Mrs. Gaskell's daughters, who well knew Miss Brontë, have declared themselves fully satisfied as to the authenticity of the Héger portrait of Charlotte Brontë and the faithfulness of the likeness. The testimony of Lady Ritchie, Thackeray's daughter, also supports this portrait. See my further references to my correspondence with her ladyship herewith. As regards the green dress, apart from the indisputable external evidence I referred to in the printed letter, I believe Charlotte Brontë speaks of it in Villette, though therein it is for obfuscation's sake (necessary indeed, since Villette was published only a short time after her London visit) made "pink" and "flounceless." In Chapter XXVIII. we find M. Paul saying—and it is interesting thus to have connected with the green dress a character whose prototype was M. Héger—that:
"Pink or scarlet, yellow or crimson, pea-green or sky-blue, [the dress] was all one."[100]
As I stated to Lady Ritchie in 1907, I believe that in Chapter XX. of Villette we undoubtedly have a real glimpse of incidents connected with the wearing of the green dress; and it should be remembered that Mrs. Bretton and Dr. John Graham Bretton in this chapter represent Mrs. Smith, and her son Mr. George Smith, the publisher, whose guest Charlotte Brontë was in 1850, when she first wore the green dress:—
One morning, Mrs. Bretton ... desired me to ... show her my dresses; which I did, without a word.
"That will do," said she.... "You must have a new one."
... She returned presently with a dressmaker. She had me measured. "I mean," said she, "to follow my own taste, and to have my own way in this little matter."
Two days after came home—a pink [green] dress! "That is not for me," I said hurriedly, feeling that I would ... as soon clothe myself in the costume of a Chinese lady of rank.
... "You will wear it this ... evening."
I thought I should not; I thought no human force should avail to put me into it.... I knew it not. It knew not me. I had not proved it.
But wear it she did; and when Graham [Mr. George Smith] stood in the doorway looking at her, she tells us her uneasy aspiration was:—
"I do hope he will not think I have been decking myself out to draw attention."
Clearly Charlotte Brontë wished posterity to learn how it came about she was garbed in "light fabric and bright tint," because the green dress was a page in her life's history. In a green dress she sat down to dine, as Mr. Thackeray's daughter, Lady Ritchie has written me she well remembers, when Charlotte Brontë dined at Thackeray's house on June 12, 1850—not the event of the distinguished party, when Carlyle, Miss Perry, Mrs. Procter, and others were present, though Lady Ritchie had once confounded the two in writing upon the subject[101]. Mr. Thackeray's daughter was a young girl at the time to which she referred, but she has made clear to me she saw Miss Brontë three times; that the chief occasion was when Charlotte Brontë wore the light green dress. This, to quote her ladyship's words to me, was "not Mrs. Brookfield's party, when neither my sister and I nor our governess dined—though we came down in the evening. The second occasion was just casually at my father's lecture-room, when she did not speak to me, and the third, finally, at the Brookfield evening party, which seems to have been such a solemn affair[102]."
These facts fix the wearing of the light green dress by Miss Brontë as June 12, 1850. Lady Ritchie tells me that "It was at an early family dinner by daylight with Charlotte Brontë, my father, Mr. George Smith, my sister and our governess, that I remember sitting next Miss Brontë at dinner and gazing at her sleeve and mittens. Her dress was of some texture like one I had had myself, which I suppose impressed it upon me, and it had a little moss or coral pattern in green on a white ground. I only remember the sleeve, the straight look, and the smooth Victorian bandeaux of hair. I am sure she was differently dressed at the Brookfield evening party."
On June 12, 1850, Charlotte Brontë wrote to her friend, Miss Nussey, from the Smiths' in London, saying:—
Thackeray made a call.... If all be well, I am to dine at his house this evening.[103]
And this was when Miss Brontë sat in a light green dress at the Thackeray dinner-table.
The Richmond portrait of Charlotte Brontë being now also in the National Portrait Gallery, I may remark that Mrs. Gaskell herself says of this portrait:—"Those best acquainted with the original were least satisfied with the resemblance.... Mr. Brontë thought ... it looked good and lifelike." Charlotte Brontë herself said her father thought the portrait looked older than she. In view of the new interest now attaching to Tabitha Aykroyd and Charlotte, it is instructive to find the latter telling us Tabitha "maintains that it is not like," and also, that Tabitha thought it "too old looking." Then she apologized for the old servant in a sentence that pathetically recalls Mrs. Dean and Bessie of "Catherine's" and "Jane's" childhood—"Doubtless she confuses her recollections of me as I was in childhood, with present impressions."[104] We discover, therefore, that in the main there was really dissatisfaction at the "old looking" presentation, and we see Charlotte Brontë from the beginning must have wished she had had her hair arrangement in that portrait as was common to her at home and in her younger days. Hence do we get a further insight into the origin of the different pose in the more characteristic and intimately faithful Héger portrait of Charlotte Brontë.