Dorothea Tanning painted The Birthday in 1942.
The work is a self-portrait in which Tanning stands in a dreamlike interior wearing a dramatically open garment. Behind and around her are doors, plants and fantastical forms, creating a compressed world that feels both intimate and uncanny. The title refers to her birthday, 25 August, rather than to a conventional celebration shown in the scene.
The Birthday became one of Tanning’s most recognized paintings and is held by the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It helped establish her as a major American Surrealist painter during the period when the movement’s European artists were relocating or exhibiting in the United States.
Tanning later moved beyond strict Surrealism, exploring abstraction, sculpture and poetry. The painting is sometimes grouped with Frida Kahlo’s autobiographical self-portraits, but Tanning’s work belongs to a different artistic and historical context. Its imagery is deliberately enigmatic rather than a literal record of a birthday event.