Fay and Jane Birkinshaw

These children are the daughters of Rita Angus’s friends Margaret and Frank Birkinshaw. Margaret was a feminist novelist, Frank a doctor. They were part of a vibrant, politically active community of artists, musicians, writers, and publishers in 1930s Christchurch.

At the time Angus painted this portrait she was interested in Renaissance portraiture, in which objects and clothing were chosen to tell the viewer something of the sitter’s life and identity. Angus took care arranging the toys and objects behind the little girls, even dressing the dolls herself.

The painting was exhibited in 1938, before Rita Angus gave it to the Birkinshaws. Fay Birkinshaw, now the British novelist Fay Weldon, says that her mother secretly hated the flat ‘garishness’ of the portrait and hung it in a dark corner of their house. Margaret Birkinshaw left the painting behind when returning to England in 1946, but a friend ran up with it just as the boat was leaving the dock. Tempted to drop it into the harbour, Birkinshaw instead asked for it to be returned to Angus.

References: Jill Trevelyan, Rita Angus: an artist’s life (Te Papa Press, 2nd edition, 2021), pp. 88-90; and Fay Weldon in Rita Angus: New Zealand modernist (Te Papa Press, 2022), p. 76.