Paula Rego valuation
Portuguese-born British painter of fierce, unsettling stories, in which women are seldom the victims they first appear.
Paula Rego (1935–2022) was born in Lisbon, was sent to school in England, and studied at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1952 to 1956, where she met the painter Victor Willing, whom she married.
What a work by Paula Rego is worth
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Bio
Paula Rego (1935–2022) was born in Lisbon, was sent to school in England, and studied at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1952 to 1956, where she met the painter Victor Willing, whom she married. She divided her time between Portugal and London before settling in London in 1976. Her early work was collage and expressive abstraction; from the 1980s she painted narrative pictures drawn from fairy tales, nursery rhymes, family life and Portuguese folklore, staged like theatre and peopled with girls, maids, dogs and animals in human roles. In 1990 she became the first Associate Artist at the National Gallery in London, painting Crivelli's Garden for the Sainsbury Wing. From 1994 she worked mostly in pastel, often on a large scale, with her model Lila Nunes posing for many of the figures, and the series about abortion that followed the Portuguese referendum of 1998 is among her best-known work. She was made a Dame in 2010, and Tate Britain gave her a retrospective in 2021.
Her paintings and large pastels are unique and many are in museums, so much of what comes to market is printed: etchings and aquatints in editions, often in series such as Nursery Rhymes of 1989, Peter Pan and Jane Eyre, along with lithographs. Edition number, signature and publisher should be recorded, and which series a print belongs to. The pastels are on paper, usually mounted on aluminium, and pastel does not tolerate rubbing against glazing or rough handling, so a work's framing matters. Drawings and studies sit between the two.
The Dame with the Goat's Foot
In 2011 and 2012 she made a series of six large pastels retelling A Dama Pé de Cabra, a nineteenth-century tale by the Portuguese writer Alexandre Herculano, in which a goat-footed woman is a devil in disguise. Rego turns the villain into the story's centre. Dame with Goat's Foot I (Undressing the Divine Lady) is the first of the pastels, and related etchings with aquatint, printed at Paupers Press and published by Marlborough, followed in 2012.
The Casa das Histórias Paula Rego, a museum of her work designed by Eduardo Souto de Moura, opened in Cascais, outside Lisbon, in 2009.
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