Journal

But to return to happier days. It was the summer of 1838 when the decision
was made for Branwell to become a portrait painter in Bradford, despite
significant gaps in his technical training. Bradford was chosen because it was
the home of Patrick’s friend and relative by marriage, the Reverend William
Morgan, who arranged Branwell’s lodgings with the Kirby family there. Both
Morgan and the Vicar of Bradford, Henry Heap were amongst Branwell’s
earliest sitters but neither portrait has survived.
Bradford in the late 1830s was a thriving industrial town dependent on the
wool industry, with enough wealthy families convinced of their own
importance to ensure a demand for portraiture if not for art generally. The
George Hotel in Market Street was a well-known, convivial meeting place for
the artists, writers and musicians of Bradford. Branwell, with his exuberant
wit and gift of repartéé, was a popular member of a lively group of about
20 brilliant men, including the poet, Richard Story; Hartley Coleridge, son of
Samuel Coleridge; Richard Waller, the portrait artist, plus several very
successful artists/engravers including Joseph Clayton Bentley, William
Overend Geller, John and Charles Cousen, and many more. Two members
of the group became Branwell’s closest friends, the artist John Hunter
Thompson who had also studied under William Robinson, and the brilliant
sculptor, Joseph Bentley Leyland.
Another member of the group was William Dearden, the Keighley
schoolmaster who knew Branwell as a child. It was this staunch group of
drinking companions who rallied to try and salvage Branwell’s reputation after
the publication in 1857 of Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë which
they thought highlighted Charlotte’s virtue and unfairly exaggerated Branwell’s
alcohol and drug problems. Dearden was the first to make the erroneous
suggestion that Wuthering Heights was at least partly the work of Branwell
Brontë when his article Who wrote Wuthering Heights? appeared in the Halifax
Guardian on 15 June, 1867. The controversy this article sparked continues to
this day. Francis Leyland, younger brother of Branwell’s closest friend, Joseph
Bentley Leyland, wrote a two-volume biography in 1886: The Brontë Family
with special reference to Patrick Branwell Brontë which could be renamed The Brontë
Family and in defence of Patrick Branwell Brontë. Branwell’s friendship with Joseph
Leyland probably led to more harm than good as they both became
incurable alcoholics. Branwell’s death in 1848 was followed just three years
later by that of Joseph Leyland, in debt and in the Manor Goal, Halifax, aged
only thirty-nine.
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