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The Birthday
1868
Artwork Viewer
The Birthday was the first painting by William Holman Hunt, a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, to enter a public collection on the West Coast of the United States. It portrays Edith Waugh—Hunt’s second wife and the sister of his deceased first wife, Fanny—on her twenty-first birthday. With its vibrant coloring and tactile brushwork, The Birthday embodies the aesthetic forged by the Pre-Raphaelites against the grain of the more narrative approach then championed by official art institutions. As one observer noted in a review of the 1869 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, where The Birthday was first exhibited, “Mr. Holman Hunt […] is ‘in’ the Academy as an exhibitor, but, for reasons best known to himself, not ‘of’ it.”
- Artist
- William Holman Hunt
- Title
- The Birthday
- Date
- 1868
- Object Type
- Painting
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 40 1/2 x 28 5/8 in. (102.9 x 72.7 cm)
- Credit Line
- Museum purchase, Roscoe and Margaret Oakes Endowment Income Fund and Grover A. Magnin Endowment Bequest Income Fund
- Accession Number
- 2019.33