Paula Rego made pictures that feel like a play stopped mid-scene. A girl grips a dog, women crowd a small room, a child dances on a moonlit shore, and the viewer is left to decide what happened a second earlier. That sense of suspended narrative is why Paula Rego matters to illustrators, editorial designers and anyone who has to tell a story in one frame. This guide looks at how she composed, drew and printed them.
A note on images: none of the Paula Rego works in the online collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago or the Cleveland Museum of Art is flagged as public domain. She died in 2022 and her work is in copyright, so this guide describes the pieces in text and shows none of them. For figurative work that is cleared for reuse, browse the MGD museum inspiration collection.
Who was Paula Rego?
Maria Paula Figueiroa Rego was born in Lisbon on 26 January 1935, according to the Royal Academy and The Burlington Magazine’s obituary, and grew up under the dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar. Burlington notes that she enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art in London at seventeen; the Royal Academy dates her Slade studies to 1952–56. There she met the painter Victor Willing, whom she later married.
Her early work was openly political. The Met’s essay “The Deeply Political Art of Paula Rego” says that as early as 1950, while still a teenager in Portugal, she made art challenging Salazar’s regime, and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation’s collection lists her painting Salazar Vomiting the Homeland as an oil on canvas of 1960. A Gulbenkian study grant around 1961–63 (sources give 1961–62 and 1962–63) helped her work in London, and from 1962 she exhibited with The London Group.
Tate says Willing died in 1988 while she was working on The Dance. The National Gallery in London then made her its Associate Artist; its own pages give the residency as 1990–91 in one place and 1990–92 in another. Later honours included a damehood in 2010. In 2009 the Casa das Histórias Paula Rego, a museum designed by the architect Eduardo Souto de Moura, opened in Cascais, Portugal. Her gallery, Victoria Miro, announced her death in London on 8 June 2022, at the age of 87.
What to look at in a Paula Rego picture
Her mature paintings and pastels share a small set of devices that are easy to name once you have seen a few:
- A shallow stage. Figures stand close to the picture plane, in a room or a strip of landscape with little depth behind them. The space reads like a set, with props placed for meaning.
- Heavy, solid figures. Bodies are large, compact and weighty, filling the frame. Hands, feet and faces are drawn with a firm contour, so gesture carries the story.
- Tension between figures. Two or three people lean towards or away from each other; who holds whom, who looks where, and who turns away are the real subjects.
- Muted grounds, saturated accents. Earthy browns, greys and dusty greens set off a few strong notes: a blue skirt, a red bow, a white collar.
- Direct gaze. A figure often looks straight out, making the viewer a witness rather than a bystander.
Tate’s description of The Dance (1988) shows these in one canvas: a mother, a grandmother and a child dance on a beach at night, and a male figure appears twice. Tate bought the painting, which measures about 2.13 by 2.74 metres, in 1989. Rego’s figures share the frontal, stage-lit quality of Expressionist painting, though her drawing is far more controlled.
From collage to acrylic to pastel
Rego’s technique changed sharply over her career, and each phase offers designers something different.
Collage (1960s). Early works such as When We Had a House in the Country (1961) combine collage and oil on a long, frieze-like canvas. Figures were drawn, painted, cut out and reassembled, producing crowded, fragmented surfaces closer to political cartoons than to traditional painting.
Acrylic (1980s). By the late 1980s she was painting large figurative scenes in acrylic; Victoria Miro lists The Dance as acrylic on paper laid on canvas. Drawing became clearer and forms more sculptural.
Pastel (from 1994). Tate’s exhibition guide says that in 1994 she began a series of large pastels of single female figures, the Dog Women, and that in this series she started working regularly with the model Lila Nunes. Several accounts describe Dog Woman as the work that moved her from acrylic to pastel. Pastel let her build colour in dense layers and draw directly, so line and tone happen in the same stroke. Tate also connects the series to a Portuguese folk tale.
In 1998 she made an untitled series of pastels in response to Portugal’s referendum on abortion that year. Artnet’s obituary reports that the works were later used in campaigning before the second referendum in 2007. The pastels show women alone in bare rooms, and their force comes from posture and gaze rather than any graphic detail.
Paula Rego’s prints: fairy tales on copper
Printmaking runs through her whole career and is the part of her output most directly useful to illustrators. Phillips and Christie’s both date her Nursery Rhymes etchings and aquatints to 1989, made with the printer Paul Coldwell; the two give different counts for the set. The Art Institute of Chicago holds A Frog he would a-wooing go I (1989), an etching and aquatint on ivory wove paper.
The Peter Pan etchings followed in 1992, and The Met has acquired The Neverland from Peter Pan, a colour etching and aquatint of that year. Phillips describes how she drew in gouache onto a wax-ground copper plate before etching, which allowed her to rework passages as each image developed. The Jane Eyre series of about 2001–02 is in lithography; Hogarth’s House, which showed the prints, notes that the series is all lithographs.
She also answered older artists directly. The Cleveland Museum of Art holds After Hogarth II (2000), an etching and aquatint that responds to the eighteenth-century satirist William Hogarth. For more on the medium itself, see our guide to etching.
Key works and where to see them
- Salazar Vomiting the Homeland (1960), oil on canvas, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon.
- The Dance (1988), acrylic on paper laid on canvas, Tate, London.
- Crivelli’s Garden (1990–91), acrylic on canvas, National Gallery, London. The National Gallery describes this multi-panel work, made during her residency, as showing the lives of female saints, with a structure drawn from the backgrounds of paintings by the fifteenth-century artist Carlo Crivelli. It measures about 1.9 by 9.4 metres.
- Dog Woman (1994), pastel, the start of the Dog Women series.
Tate Britain held a large retrospective from 7 July to 24 October 2021, organised with Kunstmuseum Den Haag and Museo Picasso Málaga. The Casa das Histórias in Cascais keeps a collection of her work alongside paintings by Victor Willing.
How designers can borrow from Paula Rego
Her methods translate well to illustration, covers and storyboards:
- Pick the moment before or after. Rego rarely shows the climax. Choose the instant just before an action or just after it, and let the viewer complete the story.
- Build a shallow set. Keep figures large and near the front, with a simple backdrop and two or three props that carry meaning.
- Make gesture do the work. Sketch the hands and the tilt of the head first; if the story reads in silhouette, the image will hold at thumbnail size.
- Use a muted base and few accents. Set up a palette of earth tones and greys, then add one or two saturated colours for the key object. Try it in our colour palette generator.
- Retell, don’t illustrate. Like her nursery rhymes and Hogarth responses, take a familiar story and shift the point of view to someone it usually ignores.
Her retold fairy tales sit well beside the surreal storytelling of Leonora Carrington, another woman artist who built private mythologies from folklore.
Copyright and reuse
Paula Rego died in 2022, and her paintings, pastels and prints remain in copyright. None is flagged public domain by the Met, the Art Institute of Chicago or the Cleveland Museum of Art, and nothing here should be read as permission to reproduce her work.
Frequently asked questions
What is Paula Rego known for?
She is known for large figurative paintings, pastels and prints that retell folk tales, nursery rhymes and literature, often from a woman’s point of view, with staged scenes and solid, expressive figures.
What medium did Paula Rego use?
Her work moved from collage and oil in the 1960s to acrylic in the 1980s and to pastel from 1994, according to Tate. She also made many etchings, aquatints and lithographs throughout her career.
Where can I see Paula Rego’s work?
Tate and the National Gallery in London hold major paintings, and the Casa das Histórias Paula Rego in Cascais, Portugal, is devoted to her. The Met, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Cleveland Museum of Art hold prints.
Are Paula Rego images public domain?
No. She died in 2022 and her works are in copyright. None of the three museums checked for this guide flags any of her works as public domain, so none is reproduced here.
