In fancy dress

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

Harry Linley Richardson relied on his family to model for him. This painting shows the artist with his three daughters — Joan, Cynthia, with fairy wings, and Barbara. Teenager Alan had by this date refused
to model for his father any longer, so does not appear in this and later paintings. Within three years both Joan and Cynthia had died, a reminder of how fragile life was before widespread advances in medicine.

Richardson painted <em>In fancy dress</em> soon after he moved to ManawatŪ in 1928 to become art instructor at Palmerston North Boys’ High School, having been unsuccessful in his bid to be art director at the Wellington Technical College, where he had been the art master for 20 years. Despite this setback, the ambitious compositions and dramatic colours of his late-career paintings remain his most exciting.

In fancy dress is typical of Richardson’s group portraits of his children in that the Here they are anchored within interlocking oval shapes of arms and heads, faces, wings, shirt front, corsage and lanterns. Following in the English figure-painting tradition from Thomas Gainsborough to John Singer Sargent, Richardson’s portrait is as much about textures as it is about the people. It was painted under artificial light, and his placement of the silk lanterns in the extremely shallow space between the figures and the trellis and curtain casts the startling green light that causes the girls’ silk dresses and hair to shimmer.

One contemporary critic felt that Richardson’s concentration on beautiful textures tended to drive ‘all the sparkle out of the children’.1

His portraits of eminent Māori in finely rendered traditional dress from the 1930s and 1940s are also in modern, high-key colours. These vigorously painted figures frequently look directly at the viewer and demonstrate that Richardson was able to paint images that captured the vitality of his subjects.

<em>In fancy dress</em> was purchased in 1948 by the National Art Gallery from Richardson’s memorial exhibition held by his long-time dealer, McGregor Wright Gallery in Wellington.

Jane Vial

1 ‘Dunedin Public Art Gallery Society’,

Otago Daily Times, 16 November 1927, p. 15.

H. Linley Richardson, In Fancy Dress (a.k.a. Party, Christmas Eve), about 1930, Te Papa

In its absence of religious content, H. Linley Richardson’s painting, <em>In Fancy Dress</em>, takes us closer to the spirit of Christmases that most of us experience today. That said, its period elegance, evocative of the Noel Coward era, pre-dates the lifespans of anyone but the very elderly. We meet the artist, immaculate in white tie, and his three daughters clad in shimmering silk dresses, assembled for a special occasion. But what it was we do not know. The life-sized scale, static poses and strangely unanimated expressions of the figures only heighten the enigma. Cynthia, the youngest daughter, wears wings and bears a silver-starred wand. She is a living version of the fairy at the top of the Christmas tree, while her face has an endearingly pudding-like shape. Although Richardson’s biographer, Jane Vial, plays down the Christmas aspects, when it was bought by the National Art Gallery, forerunner of Te Papa, soon after Richardson’s death, the painting went under the title of <em>Party, Christmas Eve</em>. Yet it would be pushing it to claim that the Richardsons are having a merry Christmas!