46 Facts About Paula Rego

Paula Rego studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and was an exhibiting member of The London Group, along with David Hockney and Frank Auerbach.

Paula Rego was born on 26 January 1935 in Lisbon, Portugal.

Paula Rego's father was an electrical engineer who worked for the Marconi Company and was ardently anti-fascist.

Paula Rego's mother was a competent artist but, as a conventional Portuguese woman from the early 20th century, gave her daughter no encouragement towards a career, even though she began drawing at age 4.

Paula Rego's parents left her behind in Portugal in the care of her grandmother until 1939.

Paula Rego's grandmother was to become a significant figure in her life, as she learned from her grandmother and the family maid many of the traditional folktales that would one day make their way into her art work.

Paula Rego's family were keen Anglophiles, and Paula Rego was sent to the only English-language school in the Lisbon area at the time, Saint Julian's School in Carcavelos, which she attended from 1945 to 1951.

Paula Rego described herself as having become a "sort of Catholic", but as a child she possessed a sense of Catholic guilt and a very strong belief that the Devil was real.

In 1951, Paula Rego was sent to the United Kingdom to attend a finishing school called The Grove School, in Sevenoaks, Kent.

Unhappy there, Paula Rego attempted in 1952 to start studies in art at the Chelsea School of Art in London, but was advised against this choice by her legal guardian in Britain, David Phillips, who had heard that a young woman had become pregnant while a student there.

Paula Rego suggested to her parents that the Slade School of Fine Art was a more respectable choice and helped her achieve a place there.

Paula Rego was the Portuguese representative at the 1969 Sao Paulo Art Biennial.

In 1988, Paula Rego was the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon and the Serpentine Gallery in London.

In 1995, Paula Rego used pastels to revise the story of Snow White in her drawing Swallows the Poisoned Apple.

Paula Rego "lays clutching her skirts, as if trying to cling to life and her femininity which are slipping away".

At the time the artwork was made, Paula Rego was about 60 years old and her age did play a significant part in this artwork.

In 2008, Paula Rego exhibited at the Marlborough Chelsea in New York, and staged a retrospective of her graphic works at the Ecole Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Nimes, France.

In 2011, Paula Rego appeared in the documentary Looking for Lowry with Ian McKellen as an interviewee, commenting on her experience with Lowry at the Slade School of Fine Art.

Paula Rego was commissioned by the Royal Mail in 2004 to produce a set of Jane Eyre stamps.

Paula Rego's work was included in the 2022 exhibition Women Painting Women at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

At the time of her death, Paula Rego was represented by the Victoria Miro Gallery and the Cristea Roberts Gallery.

Paula Rego spent much of her career focusing on women's rights and abortion rights.

Paula Rego opposed the criminalisation of abortion and said that the anti-abortion movement "criminalises women" and in some instances will force women to find potentially deadly "backstreet solutions".

Paula Rego stated that it disproportionately affected poor women, as it was easier for the rich to find a safe abortion because they could afford to travel abroad for the procedure.

Paula Rego created an art series called Untitled: The Abortion Pastels documenting illegal abortions in response to Portugal's 1998 referendum on abortion.

Paula Rego began the series of ten pastels in July 1998, completing it over the approximately six months up to February 1999.

Paula Rego expressed a feeling of rage, pointing out the "total hypocrisy" of the outcome.

Paula Rego used two typical tropes of Western art history: "the gaze" and "the reclining nude".

Paula Rego utilised "the gaze" in conscious ways to challenge the viewer by having the woman or girl look directly at the viewer or away in agony or closing her eyes in pain.

At the Slade School of Fine Art, Paula Rego began an affair with fellow student Victor Willing, who was already married to another artist, Hazel Whittington.

Paula Rego had many abortions during their affair, starting from when she was 18 years old, because Willing had threatened to return to his wife if Paula Rego kept their child.

In 1957, Paula Rego left the UK to live in Ericeira in Portugal because she had decided to keep their latest baby.

Paula Rego had two daughters, Caroline 'Cas' Willing and Victoria Willing, and a son, Nick Willing, with Victor Willing.

In 1962, Paula Rego's father bought the couple a house in London, at Albert Street in Camden Town, and Paula Rego's time was spent divided between Britain and Portugal.

Paula Rego's husband had several extra-marital affairs throughout their marriage, and some of his mistresses were depicted in Rego's drawings.

In 1966, Paula Rego's father died, and the family electrical business was taken over by Paula Rego's husband, Victor, although he had himself been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, had no experience of electrical engineering or management, and spoke only limited Portuguese.

Paula Rego failed in 1974 following the Carnation Revolution that overthrew the country's right-wing Estado Novo dictatorship, when its production works were taken over by revolutionary forces although Rego's family had been supporters of the political Left.

Paula Rego died after a short illness on 8 June 2022 at the age of 87 and was buried with Victor Willing in Hampstead Cemetery.

Paula Rego was a prolific painter and printmaker, and in earlier years produced collage work.

Under the encouragement of her fellow student and later husband Victor Willing while at the Slade, Paula Rego kept alongside her official school sketchbooks a "secret sketchbook" in which she made free-form drawings that would have been frowned upon by her tutors.

Paula Rego gave up working with collage in the late 1970s, and began using pastels as a medium in the early 90s.

Paula Rego continued to use pastels up to her death, almost to the exclusion of oil paint.

Paula Rego went on to receive honorary degrees: a Master of Arts from the Winchester School of Art in 1992, Doctorate of Letters from the University of St Andrews and the University of East Anglia, both in 1999, the Rhode Island School of Design in 2000, the London Institute in 2002, and the University of Oxford and Roehampton University in 2005.

Paula Rego was appointed a Grand Officer of the Order of Saint James of the Sword by the President of Portugal in 1995 and a Grand Cross of the order in 2004, and was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire in the 2010 Queen's Birthday Honours.

In 2009, a museum dedicated to Rego's work and designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning architect Eduardo Souto de Moura, the Casa das Historias Paula Rego, was opened in Cascais, Portugal, and several key exhibitions of her work have since been staged there.

Paula Rego won the MAPFRE Foundation Drawing Prize in Madrid in 2010.