A rare photograph of the Reverend Patrick Bronte – father of the three famous Bronte sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne – has come back home after 110 years.

The miniature, thought to have been taken at the Bronte Parsonage around 1860, about a year before his death aged 84, has gone on public display at the Bronte Parsonage Museum in Haworth.

It is on permanent loan to the Bronte shrine from a woman who lives in the south of England and who paid £1,476 for the memento – three times the expected price – at auction last month.

She wishes to remain anonymous, but bought it to ensure it stayed in England and also went back to Haworth.

Ann Dinsdale, Bronte Parsonage museum collector, said: “It was a very generous offer and we’re so pleased to have the photograph to display because it could well have disappeared and not been seen in public again.We will be inviting her up to see it later.

“It’s special because Patrick is full face. The well known image of him is a profile. He has an extraordinary face – he was indeed an extraordinary man..

“One of his foibles was to keep a loaded pistol with him, a habit he had since moving from Hartshead where he worked as a young curate and where there had been a lot of disquiet because of Luddite activity.

“He was very frail when the photograph was taken and was possibly got out of his bed and dressed for the occasion.”

But he had been proud of his family’s achievement and was happy to have his photograph taken at a time when his late daughters’ fame was spreading far and wide, she added.

At the last sale of the miniature, at an auction by Sotheby’s in London in 1898, it fetched just one shilling – 5p in today’s money.

At one time it had been owned by the Bronte servant Martha Brown and had passed down through her family, and was eventually on display at the first Bronte museum housed in the Temperance tea rooms in the village.

l An exhibition of landscape photographs, inspired by Top Withens, the location of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, by artist Sam Taylor-Wood, will go on show at the Bronte Parsonage Museum from tomorrow until Monday, November 2.

Ghosts is being opened by broadcaster and art critic Matthew Collings, and the photographs have been resized to fit the Parsonage, and will be exhibited in the period rooms of the Parsonage Museum as part of its Contemporary Arts Programme 2009.

The exhibition has been made possible with the support of Arts Council England and Bradford Council.

Taylor-Wood is at the centre of the Young British Artist movement of contemporary British art, part of the same generation as Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin.

* For more information, contact (01535) 640188.