Birthday

Ernst Hermann Schlichting was not only a portraitist but also a genre and landscape painter. Birthday is one of the few works in Estonian art that offers a glimpse into the lifestyle and customs of Baltic Germans. The portrait shows a young woman admiring her birthday gifts: freshly cut roses, jewellery and a silk scarf. A feature that occupies a prominent place in the painting is the elaborately decorated birthday cake, which shows the finesse of Baltic German cuisine. “What an effort had been made to create those confectionary masterpieces, to achieve a level of grandeur and elegance superior to all others! White icing alternated with pink, studded with the finest ornaments made of berries and pieces of jelly, and with sugar paste artfully arranged into elaborate arabesques and garlands surrounding the name of the birthday girl or boy.”*
*Unknown author’s recollections of life in Livonia in the 1840s. Published in the collection Aus vergangenen Tagen (“On Days Gone By”) by Friedrich Bienemann. 1913.