Celia Paul's Brontë portraits

This is an exhibition going on at the Victoria Miro Gallery in London, with several Brontë-related connections:

Celia Paul
13 November - 20 December 2019
Victoria Miro Gallery II
16 Wharf Rd, Hoxton, London N1 7RW, United Kingdom

Victoria Miro presents new and recent works by the celebrated painter in an exhibition that coincides with the publication of Paul’s memoir, Self-Portrait, published by Jonathan Cape, and the release of a documentary film about the artist by Jake Auerbach. (...)
Paul, born in 1959 to missionary parents in South India, moved with her family to England during childhood, living in north Devon, where her father was head of the Lee Abbey religious community, and near Haworth, West Yorkshire. An affiliation with the Brontës, creative sisters and the children of a clergyman like the Pauls, intensified while Paul’s father was Bishop of Bradford, when the artist would visit the Brontë parsonage at Haworth. Based on recent studies of the house made during winter, The Brontë Parsonage (with Charlotte’s Pine and Emily’s Path to the Moors), 2017, shows the building dwarfed by surrounding trees, the gravestones of the neighbouring church in the foreground and, in the distance, a hillside track glinting in the February light – motifs that signify mortality, longing  and escape. A love of Branwell Brontë’s work, especially his painting of his three sisters, in which the artist appears as a spectral presence (c1834, in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London) was an early influence, one that encouraged Paul to make paintings of her own sisters.

Emily (left) and Charlotte, both 2019. Source: Hackney Citizen