Harry Linley Richardson: Cynthia’s Birthday
Harry Linley Richardson Cynthia’s Birthday 1926–7. Oil on canvas. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, presented by the Canterbury Society of Arts, 1932
I have always been drawn to, and repelled by, Harry Linley Richardson’s Cynthia’s Birthday. This odd painting – capturing a group of children, gathered around a birthday cake with the graven solemnity of a pre-Renaissance Lamentation – typifies a quality of ambiguity I most value in both painting and poetry; something I call counterplay. Borrowed from chess, counterplay is the term I use to describe the sense that a work is pulling you in two directions at once, usually with tragicomic effect.
Here, children are earnestly participating in what ought to be a joyous, spontaneous occasion: a birthday party. They are perfectly groomed. Their round, submissive heads are echoed in the shapes of flowerheads repeated in the foreground and background. The painted china plate; the luscious scenery out the window; the framed certificates on the wall; all speak of an affluent, orderly life. Yet the children themselves seem unable to feel any joy. I imagine their family life dominated by the anxiety of two parents, trying to run a ‘normal’ household, while the children live in constant fear of upsetting those expectations.
I certainly didn’t grow up in such a household, but I relate painfully to the feeling, written on the face of even the youngest child, that something is rotten in the state of Denmark. There were many times in my childhood when I felt myself incapable of feeling whatever childlike feeling – usually joy or excitement – that I felt I was expected to feel. This painting, with all its awkwardness, at once brings me back to those odd, painful moments, and reassures me that I was not the only one who felt that way.
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Collection
Harry Linley Richardson Cynthia’s Birthday
Harry Linley Richardson began painting Cynthia’s Birthday in Karori, Wellington in December 1926. When purchased for Christchurch’s intended new art gallery in 1928, it attracted much criticism, largely for the children’s doll-like immobility. “Where is the joyful spirit of a birthday party? Why, such dolefulness?” wrote “Disgusted Ratepayer” to the Press, also discerning “no concentration on the matter at hand, namely, the lighting of the candle.”While others defended the selection, the painter himself had no comeback. London-born Richardson had arrived in New Zealand to teach at Wellington Technical College in 1908, and was a painter with a background in illustration and design, influences both evident in this work. Looking back rather than forward, he also admired the work of mid-Victorian Pre-Raphaelite painters such as John Everett Millais, whose devotion to realism with decorative effect and melancholic tone Cynthia’s Birthday certainly suggests.The work’s solemnity also makes it difficult perhaps not to consider the demands made on sitters, even the most pliable – these were the artist’s children – and the inherent tensions of artist-model relationships.
(Persistent encounters, March 2020)
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