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.”
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