Above all, Paula Rego (1935 – 2022) was an extraordinary storyteller. Through drawing, collage, printmaking and painting, she reinvented and reframed traditional folklore, famous fairy tales, myths and nursery rhymes. With feminist hands, she gave them new endings, more complex characters (including not so wicked witches or passive princesses), and injected them with her own autobiography.
I first came across her dark visual tales on a school trip to Tate Britain, aged 17, when I wandered off from my class and found a small display of her pictures, including ‘The Pillowman Triptych’ (2004), which is of epic proportions, and ‘The Dance’ (1988). Standing face-to-face with her psychologically-loaded, narrative work in which women’s perspectives are forefronted, I felt like I was looking into a magic mirror on the wall – and my world changed.
Through her stories, and a cloak of enchantment, Rego reflects feelings, fears, experiences and human nature – what’s inside of us all, that we often keep hidden from view. I also saw the true power of art, which can express more than words, and knew I wanted a career working with it.
I bought Tate’s accompanying catalogue for £2.50, which carries traces of my life in art, from paint spatters during A-level art days to chapter notes from my Master’s dissertation, when I was fortunate enough to interview Rego herself. More recently, I underlined quotes relevant to a chapter on Rego’s collaborative models for my book MUSE. This catalogue still is, and always will be, among my most prized possessions.
Some 20 years later, I dug out that catalogue once again on the occasion of a new exhibition, Drawing from Life at Cristea Roberts Gallery. This major show has been centred around 3 intensely personal and productive years that the late artist spent in her studio, focusing on her drawing practice.
From 2005 to 2007, when she was in her 70s, Rego began to explore darker and more complex themes than ever before. She drew inspiration from traditional stories, but also found a new catalyst for this work, thanks to writer and director Martin McDonagh, as she’d just seen his play ‘The Pillowman’ at the National Theatre. She recognised their shared interest in the violence, humour, and beauty of fairy tales, told perhaps not for children – but an audience of adults.
Taking these stories (including McDonagh’s unpublished manuscripts) as her starting point, Rego inflected them with her own subversive vision and history, including childhood memories from Portugal, and an inner world filled with contradictions, conflict and personal crises.
Thanks to a collaboration with the Estate of Paula Rego, there are more than 30 works (as well as a recreation of the artist’s studio) in Cristea Roberts’ remarkable exhibition, that takes viewers into the extraordinary imagination of this great artist.
One traditional fairy tale retold by Rego, and featured in this show, is that of ‘The Pig King’ or ‘Prince Pig’. It’s a 16th century Italian fairy tale by Giovanni Francesco Straparola, which is deemed an early version of ‘Beauty and the Beast’.
The tale’s central themes are subordination and control, forced or arranged marriage, power games and hierarchies. These often surface in the narrative pictures of Rego, who was drawn to the dynamic between a wife and her husband, for instance – Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester, Snow white and the prince, or Wendy and Peter Pan.
Her retelling of Prince Pig gets straight to the point, centring on the relationship between three successive brides and the pig:
A king and a queen had no children after seven years. One day, the queen slept in the garden, where three fairies saw and cast spells on her. One gave her a son and the promise that no man could harm her; the second, that no one could offend her, and that the son should have every virtue; the third, that she would be wise, but that the son should be a pig until he had married three times.
Soon after, the queen had a son in the form of a pig. The king at first thought to throw the pig into the sea, but decided against it, and had him raised as a child. He learned to talk, but wallowed in mud whenever he could.
One day, the pig son told his mother that he wished to marry and persisted until the queen persuaded a poor woman to give her oldest daughter to him. Given away, the girl resolved to kill her bridegroom on their wedding night. But learning of her plans, the prince pig stabbed her with his hooves, and she died.
He then asked to marry her sister, and she too was persuaded. But, like her sister, she died in the very same way.
Finally, he married the third, youngest, and most beautiful sister. Unlike her siblings, she behaved politely to him, and returned his caresses. Soon after their marriage, the prince revealed a secret to her: he took off his pigskin and became a handsome young man in her bed. Every morning, he put the skin back on, but she was glad to have a man as her husband. Soon, she gave birth to a child, a son in human form.
Finally, the princess revealed his secret to the king and queen and told them to come to the bedchamber at night. They did, and saw their son with his pigskin lying to one side, torn to pieces. The king then abdicated and had his son crowned. He was known as King Pig, and lived long and happily with his queen.
Like so many other fairy tales this is a cautionary story – the ultimate lesson is to be gentle with your husband, pacify and care for him, and this will keep him happy.
Behind Rego’s retelling of this story is her own context – born in 1935 in Lisbon, she grew up under the authoritarian rule of the dictator Salazar and his Estado Novo state, which was founded on the Catholic church, the army, and the idealisation of woman as wife and mother, only.
Women’s rights were heavily restricted, and women were forced to perform the social norms of femininity to maintain family life. Rego was aware and witness to Portuguese fascist propaganda, featuring happy mothers raising babies at home, knowing their place.
It was stories that provided Rego with a set of rules she could play by, twist and break… as she once said, “Art is the only place you can do what you like. That’s freedom”.
In her version of Prince Pig she makes the women look defiant, not downtrodden. They appear physically and mentally stronger than the pig. Dressed in finery, he looks foolish and, at times, as if he’s being bullied. One sister appears to enjoy riding the pig – more than he does. In the artist’s hands, this is no story of hopelessness for the three sisters who are far from vulnerable or dependent on the pig.
Rego once said: “I’m interested in seeing things from the underdog’s perspective. Usually that’s a female perspective” – and that’s what you can see playing out here.
By this time, Rego was making her own models to work from in the studio, which became like a giant playroom or theatre set. She called them ‘bonecos’ a Portuguese word for puppets that reflects the ways she would play around with them. It also excites more complex feelings than the tamer, English word ‘doll’. For instance, Rego would often refer to her drawings as ‘bonecos’ as if they were living creatures in their own right, escaped from her studio.
For this series, she constructed a giant pig from papier mache and fabric, which is on view at Cristea Roberts as part of a recreation of her studio, which has been relocated for one final time. Both this immersive element and the works on show invite you into the world of her extraordinary imagination. I hope it will have as a great an impact as it’s had upon me.
Paula Rego: Drawing from Life runs until 17 Jan 2026 at Cristea Roberts Gallery, London
