Crivelli's Garden: Paula Rego storms The National Gallery
We take a visit to Rego's colossal artwork taking over The National Gallery's Room 46...
September 6, 2023
‘As a woman, I couldn’t find anything in there of interest to me,’ Paula Rego once said of the National Gallery’s permanent collection. Then, she reconsidered. ‘As a woman, I can surely find things to work with’. How glad I am she did for, without doing so, I wouldn’t get the chance to spend time in ‘Crivelli’s Garden’ (1990-1991), a ten-metre-long tribute to everything Rego held dear – now restored and on display.
Dame Paula Rego was a Portuguese-British visual artist, best known for her paintings and prints based on storytelling. Her parents were keen Anglophiles, and ardent anti-fascists, critical of Portugal's right-wing dictator António Salazar; in 1951, she was sent to finishing school in Kent, and whilst she continued to practice in the UK, her works were coloured by folk themes and traditions from her native Portugal.
Rego initially rejected the offer to be the National’s first Associate Artist in the 1980s, on the basis of their ‘masculine’ collection. This monumental, multi-panelled mural is a response to the predella panel of Carlo Crivelli’s 15th century altarpiece ‘La Madonna della Rondine’. Within it, the artist reimagines the narratives of women in biblical and mythological history, folklore, from the medieval Golden Legend.
The result positions Rego as both a woman and a European painter, two identities implied mutually exclusive by the permanent collection. I warm to rare archive photographs of the young artist in Portugal, where I might spend time with her as a living person, rather than the artistic icon and Dame I first met in the museum. Passing an hour (or three) in ‘Crivelli’s Garden’, I simply couldn’t stop smiling.
It’s similarly populated by staff from the National Gallery – many of whom were still there when I visited! – and the artist’s family and friends. There’s the lecturer, Lizzie Perrotte, as Mary Magdalene. Erika Langmuir, Head of Learning, as the Storyteller, and her then junior colleague, Ailsa Bhattacharya, the Reader as the start and anchor figure.
‘Crivelli’s Garden’ is certainly a celebration of storytelling, of paintings as ‘active’, continuous stories which are constantly being created in conversation with their viewers. Rego reinterprets conventional narratives from the past and present, much like Nalini Malani, the Gallery’s first contemporary fellow recently on display down the corridor.
Her saints and statues are here grounded, and realistic. We see Delilah, ‘a real bruiser’, and Judith’s maidservant bagging Holofernes’ head, two nods to a pioneering woman in the permanent collection, Artemisia Gentileschi – and another subject to rape early in her career.
These women are solid, present beings – working, sweeping, sitting on the floor painting. There are women educating women, and women reading, and none of the patronising tone of similar works from the early 20th century. No-one is static; even the brownish, terracotta-clay-like statues, pulsate with life. On the far right, the history side, a top-hatted man blurs into the background, fleeing by the stairs.
Movement too permeates Rego’s work and practice; she describes her residency in the National Gallery’s basement studios like that of a scurrying animal. ‘I could creep upstairs and snatch at things, and bring them down with me to the basement, where I could munch away at them. And what I brought down here from upstairs varied a lot, but I always brought something into my den.’
For its vast scale, the detail is phenomenal, with fantastical figures from swans to storks, horned figures and frogs on leads. Animals - and their theatre – play out in her contemporary practice, with the Girl and Dog series (1986), and ‘Dog Women’ (1994) too. (A full Character Key can be found by QR code.)
Hued blue, white, and black, the colours of Portuguese tiles, the whole thing is also an homage to Lisbon. Less obvious are the clunky leather boots of the Virgin Mary and her cousin, Elizabeth, which could recall ‘The Policeman’s Daughter’ (1983), Rego’s image of a sturdy young woman with her fist up the jackboot of a servant of the Portuguese military dictatorship.
‘Crivelli’s Garden’ was first designed and installed in the Dining Rooms, where Rego hoped people would revisit and sit with the work. The reality was somewhat different; her colleague and close friend Colin Wiggins celebrates that the work has been ‘liberated’ from poor lighting and the ‘splattering with gravy’. Some restoration was necessary though, taking inspiration again from those tiles, Rego had the foresight to use near wipe-clean acrylic paint.
With studies, drawings, and so much of Rego in her own words, it’s almost as though the artist is present. We get to the heart of her practice with grid lines and pencil works, testaments to the meticulous planning that went into the composition of this imaginary, fantasy-filled work. It culminates in a warm space, a wonder to behold. Rego’s mural may have been inspired by an Italian altarpiece, but only she could make a churchgoer of me.
The artist’s death in June 2022 only makes this exhibition – the first to display both works in conversation, a prospect that particularly excited the artist – all the more poignant. Rego is one of the most important artists of her generation, as much, if not more so, than Francis Bacon or Lucien Freud. But too often, she’s reduced to (great) temporary exhibitions, from the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, to Tate Britain.
So keep ‘Crivelli’s Garden’ on free and permanent display – and keep it clean! It’s the least we can do to pay tribute to a work which pays so much tribute to others.
Paula Rego: Crivelli's Garden is on view in Room 46 of the National Gallery in London until 29 October 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
‘As a woman, I couldn’t find anything in there of interest to me,’ Paula Rego once said of the National Gallery’s permanent collection. Then, she reconsidered. ‘As a woman, I can surely find things to work with’. How glad I am she did for, without doing so, I wouldn’t get the chance to spend time in ‘Crivelli’s Garden’ (1990-1991), a ten-metre-long tribute to everything Rego held dear – now restored and on display.
Dame Paula Rego was a Portuguese-British visual artist, best known for her paintings and prints based on storytelling. Her parents were keen Anglophiles, and ardent anti-fascists, critical of Portugal's right-wing dictator António Salazar; in 1951, she was sent to finishing school in Kent, and whilst she continued to practice in the UK, her works were coloured by folk themes and traditions from her native Portugal.
Rego initially rejected the offer to be the National’s first Associate Artist in the 1980s, on the basis of their ‘masculine’ collection. This monumental, multi-panelled mural is a response to the predella panel of Carlo Crivelli’s 15th century altarpiece ‘La Madonna della Rondine’. Within it, the artist reimagines the narratives of women in biblical and mythological history, folklore, from the medieval Golden Legend.
The result positions Rego as both a woman and a European painter, two identities implied mutually exclusive by the permanent collection. I warm to rare archive photographs of the young artist in Portugal, where I might spend time with her as a living person, rather than the artistic icon and Dame I first met in the museum. Passing an hour (or three) in ‘Crivelli’s Garden’, I simply couldn’t stop smiling.
It’s similarly populated by staff from the National Gallery – many of whom were still there when I visited! – and the artist’s family and friends. There’s the lecturer, Lizzie Perrotte, as Mary Magdalene. Erika Langmuir, Head of Learning, as the Storyteller, and her then junior colleague, Ailsa Bhattacharya, the Reader as the start and anchor figure.
‘Crivelli’s Garden’ is certainly a celebration of storytelling, of paintings as ‘active’, continuous stories which are constantly being created in conversation with their viewers. Rego reinterprets conventional narratives from the past and present, much like Nalini Malani, the Gallery’s first contemporary fellow recently on display down the corridor.
Her saints and statues are here grounded, and realistic. We see Delilah, ‘a real bruiser’, and Judith’s maidservant bagging Holofernes’ head, two nods to a pioneering woman in the permanent collection, Artemisia Gentileschi – and another subject to rape early in her career.
These women are solid, present beings – working, sweeping, sitting on the floor painting. There are women educating women, and women reading, and none of the patronising tone of similar works from the early 20th century. No-one is static; even the brownish, terracotta-clay-like statues, pulsate with life. On the far right, the history side, a top-hatted man blurs into the background, fleeing by the stairs.
Movement too permeates Rego’s work and practice; she describes her residency in the National Gallery’s basement studios like that of a scurrying animal. ‘I could creep upstairs and snatch at things, and bring them down with me to the basement, where I could munch away at them. And what I brought down here from upstairs varied a lot, but I always brought something into my den.’
For its vast scale, the detail is phenomenal, with fantastical figures from swans to storks, horned figures and frogs on leads. Animals - and their theatre – play out in her contemporary practice, with the Girl and Dog series (1986), and ‘Dog Women’ (1994) too. (A full Character Key can be found by QR code.)
Hued blue, white, and black, the colours of Portuguese tiles, the whole thing is also an homage to Lisbon. Less obvious are the clunky leather boots of the Virgin Mary and her cousin, Elizabeth, which could recall ‘The Policeman’s Daughter’ (1983), Rego’s image of a sturdy young woman with her fist up the jackboot of a servant of the Portuguese military dictatorship.
‘Crivelli’s Garden’ was first designed and installed in the Dining Rooms, where Rego hoped people would revisit and sit with the work. The reality was somewhat different; her colleague and close friend Colin Wiggins celebrates that the work has been ‘liberated’ from poor lighting and the ‘splattering with gravy’. Some restoration was necessary though, taking inspiration again from those tiles, Rego had the foresight to use near wipe-clean acrylic paint.
With studies, drawings, and so much of Rego in her own words, it’s almost as though the artist is present. We get to the heart of her practice with grid lines and pencil works, testaments to the meticulous planning that went into the composition of this imaginary, fantasy-filled work. It culminates in a warm space, a wonder to behold. Rego’s mural may have been inspired by an Italian altarpiece, but only she could make a churchgoer of me.
The artist’s death in June 2022 only makes this exhibition – the first to display both works in conversation, a prospect that particularly excited the artist – all the more poignant. Rego is one of the most important artists of her generation, as much, if not more so, than Francis Bacon or Lucien Freud. But too often, she’s reduced to (great) temporary exhibitions, from the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, to Tate Britain.
So keep ‘Crivelli’s Garden’ on free and permanent display – and keep it clean! It’s the least we can do to pay tribute to a work which pays so much tribute to others.
Paula Rego: Crivelli's Garden is on view in Room 46 of the National Gallery in London until 29 October 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
‘As a woman, I couldn’t find anything in there of interest to me,’ Paula Rego once said of the National Gallery’s permanent collection. Then, she reconsidered. ‘As a woman, I can surely find things to work with’. How glad I am she did for, without doing so, I wouldn’t get the chance to spend time in ‘Crivelli’s Garden’ (1990-1991), a ten-metre-long tribute to everything Rego held dear – now restored and on display.
Dame Paula Rego was a Portuguese-British visual artist, best known for her paintings and prints based on storytelling. Her parents were keen Anglophiles, and ardent anti-fascists, critical of Portugal's right-wing dictator António Salazar; in 1951, she was sent to finishing school in Kent, and whilst she continued to practice in the UK, her works were coloured by folk themes and traditions from her native Portugal.
Rego initially rejected the offer to be the National’s first Associate Artist in the 1980s, on the basis of their ‘masculine’ collection. This monumental, multi-panelled mural is a response to the predella panel of Carlo Crivelli’s 15th century altarpiece ‘La Madonna della Rondine’. Within it, the artist reimagines the narratives of women in biblical and mythological history, folklore, from the medieval Golden Legend.
The result positions Rego as both a woman and a European painter, two identities implied mutually exclusive by the permanent collection. I warm to rare archive photographs of the young artist in Portugal, where I might spend time with her as a living person, rather than the artistic icon and Dame I first met in the museum. Passing an hour (or three) in ‘Crivelli’s Garden’, I simply couldn’t stop smiling.
It’s similarly populated by staff from the National Gallery – many of whom were still there when I visited! – and the artist’s family and friends. There’s the lecturer, Lizzie Perrotte, as Mary Magdalene. Erika Langmuir, Head of Learning, as the Storyteller, and her then junior colleague, Ailsa Bhattacharya, the Reader as the start and anchor figure.
‘Crivelli’s Garden’ is certainly a celebration of storytelling, of paintings as ‘active’, continuous stories which are constantly being created in conversation with their viewers. Rego reinterprets conventional narratives from the past and present, much like Nalini Malani, the Gallery’s first contemporary fellow recently on display down the corridor.
Her saints and statues are here grounded, and realistic. We see Delilah, ‘a real bruiser’, and Judith’s maidservant bagging Holofernes’ head, two nods to a pioneering woman in the permanent collection, Artemisia Gentileschi – and another subject to rape early in her career.
These women are solid, present beings – working, sweeping, sitting on the floor painting. There are women educating women, and women reading, and none of the patronising tone of similar works from the early 20th century. No-one is static; even the brownish, terracotta-clay-like statues, pulsate with life. On the far right, the history side, a top-hatted man blurs into the background, fleeing by the stairs.
Movement too permeates Rego’s work and practice; she describes her residency in the National Gallery’s basement studios like that of a scurrying animal. ‘I could creep upstairs and snatch at things, and bring them down with me to the basement, where I could munch away at them. And what I brought down here from upstairs varied a lot, but I always brought something into my den.’
For its vast scale, the detail is phenomenal, with fantastical figures from swans to storks, horned figures and frogs on leads. Animals - and their theatre – play out in her contemporary practice, with the Girl and Dog series (1986), and ‘Dog Women’ (1994) too. (A full Character Key can be found by QR code.)
Hued blue, white, and black, the colours of Portuguese tiles, the whole thing is also an homage to Lisbon. Less obvious are the clunky leather boots of the Virgin Mary and her cousin, Elizabeth, which could recall ‘The Policeman’s Daughter’ (1983), Rego’s image of a sturdy young woman with her fist up the jackboot of a servant of the Portuguese military dictatorship.
‘Crivelli’s Garden’ was first designed and installed in the Dining Rooms, where Rego hoped people would revisit and sit with the work. The reality was somewhat different; her colleague and close friend Colin Wiggins celebrates that the work has been ‘liberated’ from poor lighting and the ‘splattering with gravy’. Some restoration was necessary though, taking inspiration again from those tiles, Rego had the foresight to use near wipe-clean acrylic paint.
With studies, drawings, and so much of Rego in her own words, it’s almost as though the artist is present. We get to the heart of her practice with grid lines and pencil works, testaments to the meticulous planning that went into the composition of this imaginary, fantasy-filled work. It culminates in a warm space, a wonder to behold. Rego’s mural may have been inspired by an Italian altarpiece, but only she could make a churchgoer of me.
The artist’s death in June 2022 only makes this exhibition – the first to display both works in conversation, a prospect that particularly excited the artist – all the more poignant. Rego is one of the most important artists of her generation, as much, if not more so, than Francis Bacon or Lucien Freud. But too often, she’s reduced to (great) temporary exhibitions, from the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, to Tate Britain.
So keep ‘Crivelli’s Garden’ on free and permanent display – and keep it clean! It’s the least we can do to pay tribute to a work which pays so much tribute to others.
Paula Rego: Crivelli's Garden is on view in Room 46 of the National Gallery in London until 29 October 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
‘As a woman, I couldn’t find anything in there of interest to me,’ Paula Rego once said of the National Gallery’s permanent collection. Then, she reconsidered. ‘As a woman, I can surely find things to work with’. How glad I am she did for, without doing so, I wouldn’t get the chance to spend time in ‘Crivelli’s Garden’ (1990-1991), a ten-metre-long tribute to everything Rego held dear – now restored and on display.
Dame Paula Rego was a Portuguese-British visual artist, best known for her paintings and prints based on storytelling. Her parents were keen Anglophiles, and ardent anti-fascists, critical of Portugal's right-wing dictator António Salazar; in 1951, she was sent to finishing school in Kent, and whilst she continued to practice in the UK, her works were coloured by folk themes and traditions from her native Portugal.
Rego initially rejected the offer to be the National’s first Associate Artist in the 1980s, on the basis of their ‘masculine’ collection. This monumental, multi-panelled mural is a response to the predella panel of Carlo Crivelli’s 15th century altarpiece ‘La Madonna della Rondine’. Within it, the artist reimagines the narratives of women in biblical and mythological history, folklore, from the medieval Golden Legend.
The result positions Rego as both a woman and a European painter, two identities implied mutually exclusive by the permanent collection. I warm to rare archive photographs of the young artist in Portugal, where I might spend time with her as a living person, rather than the artistic icon and Dame I first met in the museum. Passing an hour (or three) in ‘Crivelli’s Garden’, I simply couldn’t stop smiling.
It’s similarly populated by staff from the National Gallery – many of whom were still there when I visited! – and the artist’s family and friends. There’s the lecturer, Lizzie Perrotte, as Mary Magdalene. Erika Langmuir, Head of Learning, as the Storyteller, and her then junior colleague, Ailsa Bhattacharya, the Reader as the start and anchor figure.
‘Crivelli’s Garden’ is certainly a celebration of storytelling, of paintings as ‘active’, continuous stories which are constantly being created in conversation with their viewers. Rego reinterprets conventional narratives from the past and present, much like Nalini Malani, the Gallery’s first contemporary fellow recently on display down the corridor.
Her saints and statues are here grounded, and realistic. We see Delilah, ‘a real bruiser’, and Judith’s maidservant bagging Holofernes’ head, two nods to a pioneering woman in the permanent collection, Artemisia Gentileschi – and another subject to rape early in her career.
These women are solid, present beings – working, sweeping, sitting on the floor painting. There are women educating women, and women reading, and none of the patronising tone of similar works from the early 20th century. No-one is static; even the brownish, terracotta-clay-like statues, pulsate with life. On the far right, the history side, a top-hatted man blurs into the background, fleeing by the stairs.
Movement too permeates Rego’s work and practice; she describes her residency in the National Gallery’s basement studios like that of a scurrying animal. ‘I could creep upstairs and snatch at things, and bring them down with me to the basement, where I could munch away at them. And what I brought down here from upstairs varied a lot, but I always brought something into my den.’
For its vast scale, the detail is phenomenal, with fantastical figures from swans to storks, horned figures and frogs on leads. Animals - and their theatre – play out in her contemporary practice, with the Girl and Dog series (1986), and ‘Dog Women’ (1994) too. (A full Character Key can be found by QR code.)
Hued blue, white, and black, the colours of Portuguese tiles, the whole thing is also an homage to Lisbon. Less obvious are the clunky leather boots of the Virgin Mary and her cousin, Elizabeth, which could recall ‘The Policeman’s Daughter’ (1983), Rego’s image of a sturdy young woman with her fist up the jackboot of a servant of the Portuguese military dictatorship.
‘Crivelli’s Garden’ was first designed and installed in the Dining Rooms, where Rego hoped people would revisit and sit with the work. The reality was somewhat different; her colleague and close friend Colin Wiggins celebrates that the work has been ‘liberated’ from poor lighting and the ‘splattering with gravy’. Some restoration was necessary though, taking inspiration again from those tiles, Rego had the foresight to use near wipe-clean acrylic paint.
With studies, drawings, and so much of Rego in her own words, it’s almost as though the artist is present. We get to the heart of her practice with grid lines and pencil works, testaments to the meticulous planning that went into the composition of this imaginary, fantasy-filled work. It culminates in a warm space, a wonder to behold. Rego’s mural may have been inspired by an Italian altarpiece, but only she could make a churchgoer of me.
The artist’s death in June 2022 only makes this exhibition – the first to display both works in conversation, a prospect that particularly excited the artist – all the more poignant. Rego is one of the most important artists of her generation, as much, if not more so, than Francis Bacon or Lucien Freud. But too often, she’s reduced to (great) temporary exhibitions, from the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, to Tate Britain.
So keep ‘Crivelli’s Garden’ on free and permanent display – and keep it clean! It’s the least we can do to pay tribute to a work which pays so much tribute to others.
Paula Rego: Crivelli's Garden is on view in Room 46 of the National Gallery in London until 29 October 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
‘As a woman, I couldn’t find anything in there of interest to me,’ Paula Rego once said of the National Gallery’s permanent collection. Then, she reconsidered. ‘As a woman, I can surely find things to work with’. How glad I am she did for, without doing so, I wouldn’t get the chance to spend time in ‘Crivelli’s Garden’ (1990-1991), a ten-metre-long tribute to everything Rego held dear – now restored and on display.
Dame Paula Rego was a Portuguese-British visual artist, best known for her paintings and prints based on storytelling. Her parents were keen Anglophiles, and ardent anti-fascists, critical of Portugal's right-wing dictator António Salazar; in 1951, she was sent to finishing school in Kent, and whilst she continued to practice in the UK, her works were coloured by folk themes and traditions from her native Portugal.
Rego initially rejected the offer to be the National’s first Associate Artist in the 1980s, on the basis of their ‘masculine’ collection. This monumental, multi-panelled mural is a response to the predella panel of Carlo Crivelli’s 15th century altarpiece ‘La Madonna della Rondine’. Within it, the artist reimagines the narratives of women in biblical and mythological history, folklore, from the medieval Golden Legend.
The result positions Rego as both a woman and a European painter, two identities implied mutually exclusive by the permanent collection. I warm to rare archive photographs of the young artist in Portugal, where I might spend time with her as a living person, rather than the artistic icon and Dame I first met in the museum. Passing an hour (or three) in ‘Crivelli’s Garden’, I simply couldn’t stop smiling.
It’s similarly populated by staff from the National Gallery – many of whom were still there when I visited! – and the artist’s family and friends. There’s the lecturer, Lizzie Perrotte, as Mary Magdalene. Erika Langmuir, Head of Learning, as the Storyteller, and her then junior colleague, Ailsa Bhattacharya, the Reader as the start and anchor figure.
‘Crivelli’s Garden’ is certainly a celebration of storytelling, of paintings as ‘active’, continuous stories which are constantly being created in conversation with their viewers. Rego reinterprets conventional narratives from the past and present, much like Nalini Malani, the Gallery’s first contemporary fellow recently on display down the corridor.
Her saints and statues are here grounded, and realistic. We see Delilah, ‘a real bruiser’, and Judith’s maidservant bagging Holofernes’ head, two nods to a pioneering woman in the permanent collection, Artemisia Gentileschi – and another subject to rape early in her career.
These women are solid, present beings – working, sweeping, sitting on the floor painting. There are women educating women, and women reading, and none of the patronising tone of similar works from the early 20th century. No-one is static; even the brownish, terracotta-clay-like statues, pulsate with life. On the far right, the history side, a top-hatted man blurs into the background, fleeing by the stairs.
Movement too permeates Rego’s work and practice; she describes her residency in the National Gallery’s basement studios like that of a scurrying animal. ‘I could creep upstairs and snatch at things, and bring them down with me to the basement, where I could munch away at them. And what I brought down here from upstairs varied a lot, but I always brought something into my den.’
For its vast scale, the detail is phenomenal, with fantastical figures from swans to storks, horned figures and frogs on leads. Animals - and their theatre – play out in her contemporary practice, with the Girl and Dog series (1986), and ‘Dog Women’ (1994) too. (A full Character Key can be found by QR code.)
Hued blue, white, and black, the colours of Portuguese tiles, the whole thing is also an homage to Lisbon. Less obvious are the clunky leather boots of the Virgin Mary and her cousin, Elizabeth, which could recall ‘The Policeman’s Daughter’ (1983), Rego’s image of a sturdy young woman with her fist up the jackboot of a servant of the Portuguese military dictatorship.
‘Crivelli’s Garden’ was first designed and installed in the Dining Rooms, where Rego hoped people would revisit and sit with the work. The reality was somewhat different; her colleague and close friend Colin Wiggins celebrates that the work has been ‘liberated’ from poor lighting and the ‘splattering with gravy’. Some restoration was necessary though, taking inspiration again from those tiles, Rego had the foresight to use near wipe-clean acrylic paint.
With studies, drawings, and so much of Rego in her own words, it’s almost as though the artist is present. We get to the heart of her practice with grid lines and pencil works, testaments to the meticulous planning that went into the composition of this imaginary, fantasy-filled work. It culminates in a warm space, a wonder to behold. Rego’s mural may have been inspired by an Italian altarpiece, but only she could make a churchgoer of me.
The artist’s death in June 2022 only makes this exhibition – the first to display both works in conversation, a prospect that particularly excited the artist – all the more poignant. Rego is one of the most important artists of her generation, as much, if not more so, than Francis Bacon or Lucien Freud. But too often, she’s reduced to (great) temporary exhibitions, from the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, to Tate Britain.
So keep ‘Crivelli’s Garden’ on free and permanent display – and keep it clean! It’s the least we can do to pay tribute to a work which pays so much tribute to others.
Paula Rego: Crivelli's Garden is on view in Room 46 of the National Gallery in London until 29 October 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
‘As a woman, I couldn’t find anything in there of interest to me,’ Paula Rego once said of the National Gallery’s permanent collection. Then, she reconsidered. ‘As a woman, I can surely find things to work with’. How glad I am she did for, without doing so, I wouldn’t get the chance to spend time in ‘Crivelli’s Garden’ (1990-1991), a ten-metre-long tribute to everything Rego held dear – now restored and on display.
Dame Paula Rego was a Portuguese-British visual artist, best known for her paintings and prints based on storytelling. Her parents were keen Anglophiles, and ardent anti-fascists, critical of Portugal's right-wing dictator António Salazar; in 1951, she was sent to finishing school in Kent, and whilst she continued to practice in the UK, her works were coloured by folk themes and traditions from her native Portugal.
Rego initially rejected the offer to be the National’s first Associate Artist in the 1980s, on the basis of their ‘masculine’ collection. This monumental, multi-panelled mural is a response to the predella panel of Carlo Crivelli’s 15th century altarpiece ‘La Madonna della Rondine’. Within it, the artist reimagines the narratives of women in biblical and mythological history, folklore, from the medieval Golden Legend.
The result positions Rego as both a woman and a European painter, two identities implied mutually exclusive by the permanent collection. I warm to rare archive photographs of the young artist in Portugal, where I might spend time with her as a living person, rather than the artistic icon and Dame I first met in the museum. Passing an hour (or three) in ‘Crivelli’s Garden’, I simply couldn’t stop smiling.
It’s similarly populated by staff from the National Gallery – many of whom were still there when I visited! – and the artist’s family and friends. There’s the lecturer, Lizzie Perrotte, as Mary Magdalene. Erika Langmuir, Head of Learning, as the Storyteller, and her then junior colleague, Ailsa Bhattacharya, the Reader as the start and anchor figure.
‘Crivelli’s Garden’ is certainly a celebration of storytelling, of paintings as ‘active’, continuous stories which are constantly being created in conversation with their viewers. Rego reinterprets conventional narratives from the past and present, much like Nalini Malani, the Gallery’s first contemporary fellow recently on display down the corridor.
Her saints and statues are here grounded, and realistic. We see Delilah, ‘a real bruiser’, and Judith’s maidservant bagging Holofernes’ head, two nods to a pioneering woman in the permanent collection, Artemisia Gentileschi – and another subject to rape early in her career.
These women are solid, present beings – working, sweeping, sitting on the floor painting. There are women educating women, and women reading, and none of the patronising tone of similar works from the early 20th century. No-one is static; even the brownish, terracotta-clay-like statues, pulsate with life. On the far right, the history side, a top-hatted man blurs into the background, fleeing by the stairs.
Movement too permeates Rego’s work and practice; she describes her residency in the National Gallery’s basement studios like that of a scurrying animal. ‘I could creep upstairs and snatch at things, and bring them down with me to the basement, where I could munch away at them. And what I brought down here from upstairs varied a lot, but I always brought something into my den.’
For its vast scale, the detail is phenomenal, with fantastical figures from swans to storks, horned figures and frogs on leads. Animals - and their theatre – play out in her contemporary practice, with the Girl and Dog series (1986), and ‘Dog Women’ (1994) too. (A full Character Key can be found by QR code.)
Hued blue, white, and black, the colours of Portuguese tiles, the whole thing is also an homage to Lisbon. Less obvious are the clunky leather boots of the Virgin Mary and her cousin, Elizabeth, which could recall ‘The Policeman’s Daughter’ (1983), Rego’s image of a sturdy young woman with her fist up the jackboot of a servant of the Portuguese military dictatorship.
‘Crivelli’s Garden’ was first designed and installed in the Dining Rooms, where Rego hoped people would revisit and sit with the work. The reality was somewhat different; her colleague and close friend Colin Wiggins celebrates that the work has been ‘liberated’ from poor lighting and the ‘splattering with gravy’. Some restoration was necessary though, taking inspiration again from those tiles, Rego had the foresight to use near wipe-clean acrylic paint.
With studies, drawings, and so much of Rego in her own words, it’s almost as though the artist is present. We get to the heart of her practice with grid lines and pencil works, testaments to the meticulous planning that went into the composition of this imaginary, fantasy-filled work. It culminates in a warm space, a wonder to behold. Rego’s mural may have been inspired by an Italian altarpiece, but only she could make a churchgoer of me.
The artist’s death in June 2022 only makes this exhibition – the first to display both works in conversation, a prospect that particularly excited the artist – all the more poignant. Rego is one of the most important artists of her generation, as much, if not more so, than Francis Bacon or Lucien Freud. But too often, she’s reduced to (great) temporary exhibitions, from the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, to Tate Britain.
So keep ‘Crivelli’s Garden’ on free and permanent display – and keep it clean! It’s the least we can do to pay tribute to a work which pays so much tribute to others.
Paula Rego: Crivelli's Garden is on view in Room 46 of the National Gallery in London until 29 October 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
‘As a woman, I couldn’t find anything in there of interest to me,’ Paula Rego once said of the National Gallery’s permanent collection. Then, she reconsidered. ‘As a woman, I can surely find things to work with’. How glad I am she did for, without doing so, I wouldn’t get the chance to spend time in ‘Crivelli’s Garden’ (1990-1991), a ten-metre-long tribute to everything Rego held dear – now restored and on display.
Dame Paula Rego was a Portuguese-British visual artist, best known for her paintings and prints based on storytelling. Her parents were keen Anglophiles, and ardent anti-fascists, critical of Portugal's right-wing dictator António Salazar; in 1951, she was sent to finishing school in Kent, and whilst she continued to practice in the UK, her works were coloured by folk themes and traditions from her native Portugal.
Rego initially rejected the offer to be the National’s first Associate Artist in the 1980s, on the basis of their ‘masculine’ collection. This monumental, multi-panelled mural is a response to the predella panel of Carlo Crivelli’s 15th century altarpiece ‘La Madonna della Rondine’. Within it, the artist reimagines the narratives of women in biblical and mythological history, folklore, from the medieval Golden Legend.
The result positions Rego as both a woman and a European painter, two identities implied mutually exclusive by the permanent collection. I warm to rare archive photographs of the young artist in Portugal, where I might spend time with her as a living person, rather than the artistic icon and Dame I first met in the museum. Passing an hour (or three) in ‘Crivelli’s Garden’, I simply couldn’t stop smiling.
It’s similarly populated by staff from the National Gallery – many of whom were still there when I visited! – and the artist’s family and friends. There’s the lecturer, Lizzie Perrotte, as Mary Magdalene. Erika Langmuir, Head of Learning, as the Storyteller, and her then junior colleague, Ailsa Bhattacharya, the Reader as the start and anchor figure.
‘Crivelli’s Garden’ is certainly a celebration of storytelling, of paintings as ‘active’, continuous stories which are constantly being created in conversation with their viewers. Rego reinterprets conventional narratives from the past and present, much like Nalini Malani, the Gallery’s first contemporary fellow recently on display down the corridor.
Her saints and statues are here grounded, and realistic. We see Delilah, ‘a real bruiser’, and Judith’s maidservant bagging Holofernes’ head, two nods to a pioneering woman in the permanent collection, Artemisia Gentileschi – and another subject to rape early in her career.
These women are solid, present beings – working, sweeping, sitting on the floor painting. There are women educating women, and women reading, and none of the patronising tone of similar works from the early 20th century. No-one is static; even the brownish, terracotta-clay-like statues, pulsate with life. On the far right, the history side, a top-hatted man blurs into the background, fleeing by the stairs.
Movement too permeates Rego’s work and practice; she describes her residency in the National Gallery’s basement studios like that of a scurrying animal. ‘I could creep upstairs and snatch at things, and bring them down with me to the basement, where I could munch away at them. And what I brought down here from upstairs varied a lot, but I always brought something into my den.’
For its vast scale, the detail is phenomenal, with fantastical figures from swans to storks, horned figures and frogs on leads. Animals - and their theatre – play out in her contemporary practice, with the Girl and Dog series (1986), and ‘Dog Women’ (1994) too. (A full Character Key can be found by QR code.)
Hued blue, white, and black, the colours of Portuguese tiles, the whole thing is also an homage to Lisbon. Less obvious are the clunky leather boots of the Virgin Mary and her cousin, Elizabeth, which could recall ‘The Policeman’s Daughter’ (1983), Rego’s image of a sturdy young woman with her fist up the jackboot of a servant of the Portuguese military dictatorship.
‘Crivelli’s Garden’ was first designed and installed in the Dining Rooms, where Rego hoped people would revisit and sit with the work. The reality was somewhat different; her colleague and close friend Colin Wiggins celebrates that the work has been ‘liberated’ from poor lighting and the ‘splattering with gravy’. Some restoration was necessary though, taking inspiration again from those tiles, Rego had the foresight to use near wipe-clean acrylic paint.
With studies, drawings, and so much of Rego in her own words, it’s almost as though the artist is present. We get to the heart of her practice with grid lines and pencil works, testaments to the meticulous planning that went into the composition of this imaginary, fantasy-filled work. It culminates in a warm space, a wonder to behold. Rego’s mural may have been inspired by an Italian altarpiece, but only she could make a churchgoer of me.
The artist’s death in June 2022 only makes this exhibition – the first to display both works in conversation, a prospect that particularly excited the artist – all the more poignant. Rego is one of the most important artists of her generation, as much, if not more so, than Francis Bacon or Lucien Freud. But too often, she’s reduced to (great) temporary exhibitions, from the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, to Tate Britain.
So keep ‘Crivelli’s Garden’ on free and permanent display – and keep it clean! It’s the least we can do to pay tribute to a work which pays so much tribute to others.
Paula Rego: Crivelli's Garden is on view in Room 46 of the National Gallery in London until 29 October 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
‘As a woman, I couldn’t find anything in there of interest to me,’ Paula Rego once said of the National Gallery’s permanent collection. Then, she reconsidered. ‘As a woman, I can surely find things to work with’. How glad I am she did for, without doing so, I wouldn’t get the chance to spend time in ‘Crivelli’s Garden’ (1990-1991), a ten-metre-long tribute to everything Rego held dear – now restored and on display.
Dame Paula Rego was a Portuguese-British visual artist, best known for her paintings and prints based on storytelling. Her parents were keen Anglophiles, and ardent anti-fascists, critical of Portugal's right-wing dictator António Salazar; in 1951, she was sent to finishing school in Kent, and whilst she continued to practice in the UK, her works were coloured by folk themes and traditions from her native Portugal.
Rego initially rejected the offer to be the National’s first Associate Artist in the 1980s, on the basis of their ‘masculine’ collection. This monumental, multi-panelled mural is a response to the predella panel of Carlo Crivelli’s 15th century altarpiece ‘La Madonna della Rondine’. Within it, the artist reimagines the narratives of women in biblical and mythological history, folklore, from the medieval Golden Legend.
The result positions Rego as both a woman and a European painter, two identities implied mutually exclusive by the permanent collection. I warm to rare archive photographs of the young artist in Portugal, where I might spend time with her as a living person, rather than the artistic icon and Dame I first met in the museum. Passing an hour (or three) in ‘Crivelli’s Garden’, I simply couldn’t stop smiling.
It’s similarly populated by staff from the National Gallery – many of whom were still there when I visited! – and the artist’s family and friends. There’s the lecturer, Lizzie Perrotte, as Mary Magdalene. Erika Langmuir, Head of Learning, as the Storyteller, and her then junior colleague, Ailsa Bhattacharya, the Reader as the start and anchor figure.
‘Crivelli’s Garden’ is certainly a celebration of storytelling, of paintings as ‘active’, continuous stories which are constantly being created in conversation with their viewers. Rego reinterprets conventional narratives from the past and present, much like Nalini Malani, the Gallery’s first contemporary fellow recently on display down the corridor.
Her saints and statues are here grounded, and realistic. We see Delilah, ‘a real bruiser’, and Judith’s maidservant bagging Holofernes’ head, two nods to a pioneering woman in the permanent collection, Artemisia Gentileschi – and another subject to rape early in her career.
These women are solid, present beings – working, sweeping, sitting on the floor painting. There are women educating women, and women reading, and none of the patronising tone of similar works from the early 20th century. No-one is static; even the brownish, terracotta-clay-like statues, pulsate with life. On the far right, the history side, a top-hatted man blurs into the background, fleeing by the stairs.
Movement too permeates Rego’s work and practice; she describes her residency in the National Gallery’s basement studios like that of a scurrying animal. ‘I could creep upstairs and snatch at things, and bring them down with me to the basement, where I could munch away at them. And what I brought down here from upstairs varied a lot, but I always brought something into my den.’
For its vast scale, the detail is phenomenal, with fantastical figures from swans to storks, horned figures and frogs on leads. Animals - and their theatre – play out in her contemporary practice, with the Girl and Dog series (1986), and ‘Dog Women’ (1994) too. (A full Character Key can be found by QR code.)
Hued blue, white, and black, the colours of Portuguese tiles, the whole thing is also an homage to Lisbon. Less obvious are the clunky leather boots of the Virgin Mary and her cousin, Elizabeth, which could recall ‘The Policeman’s Daughter’ (1983), Rego’s image of a sturdy young woman with her fist up the jackboot of a servant of the Portuguese military dictatorship.
‘Crivelli’s Garden’ was first designed and installed in the Dining Rooms, where Rego hoped people would revisit and sit with the work. The reality was somewhat different; her colleague and close friend Colin Wiggins celebrates that the work has been ‘liberated’ from poor lighting and the ‘splattering with gravy’. Some restoration was necessary though, taking inspiration again from those tiles, Rego had the foresight to use near wipe-clean acrylic paint.
With studies, drawings, and so much of Rego in her own words, it’s almost as though the artist is present. We get to the heart of her practice with grid lines and pencil works, testaments to the meticulous planning that went into the composition of this imaginary, fantasy-filled work. It culminates in a warm space, a wonder to behold. Rego’s mural may have been inspired by an Italian altarpiece, but only she could make a churchgoer of me.
The artist’s death in June 2022 only makes this exhibition – the first to display both works in conversation, a prospect that particularly excited the artist – all the more poignant. Rego is one of the most important artists of her generation, as much, if not more so, than Francis Bacon or Lucien Freud. But too often, she’s reduced to (great) temporary exhibitions, from the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, to Tate Britain.
So keep ‘Crivelli’s Garden’ on free and permanent display – and keep it clean! It’s the least we can do to pay tribute to a work which pays so much tribute to others.
Paula Rego: Crivelli's Garden is on view in Room 46 of the National Gallery in London until 29 October 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
‘As a woman, I couldn’t find anything in there of interest to me,’ Paula Rego once said of the National Gallery’s permanent collection. Then, she reconsidered. ‘As a woman, I can surely find things to work with’. How glad I am she did for, without doing so, I wouldn’t get the chance to spend time in ‘Crivelli’s Garden’ (1990-1991), a ten-metre-long tribute to everything Rego held dear – now restored and on display.
Dame Paula Rego was a Portuguese-British visual artist, best known for her paintings and prints based on storytelling. Her parents were keen Anglophiles, and ardent anti-fascists, critical of Portugal's right-wing dictator António Salazar; in 1951, she was sent to finishing school in Kent, and whilst she continued to practice in the UK, her works were coloured by folk themes and traditions from her native Portugal.
Rego initially rejected the offer to be the National’s first Associate Artist in the 1980s, on the basis of their ‘masculine’ collection. This monumental, multi-panelled mural is a response to the predella panel of Carlo Crivelli’s 15th century altarpiece ‘La Madonna della Rondine’. Within it, the artist reimagines the narratives of women in biblical and mythological history, folklore, from the medieval Golden Legend.
The result positions Rego as both a woman and a European painter, two identities implied mutually exclusive by the permanent collection. I warm to rare archive photographs of the young artist in Portugal, where I might spend time with her as a living person, rather than the artistic icon and Dame I first met in the museum. Passing an hour (or three) in ‘Crivelli’s Garden’, I simply couldn’t stop smiling.
It’s similarly populated by staff from the National Gallery – many of whom were still there when I visited! – and the artist’s family and friends. There’s the lecturer, Lizzie Perrotte, as Mary Magdalene. Erika Langmuir, Head of Learning, as the Storyteller, and her then junior colleague, Ailsa Bhattacharya, the Reader as the start and anchor figure.
‘Crivelli’s Garden’ is certainly a celebration of storytelling, of paintings as ‘active’, continuous stories which are constantly being created in conversation with their viewers. Rego reinterprets conventional narratives from the past and present, much like Nalini Malani, the Gallery’s first contemporary fellow recently on display down the corridor.
Her saints and statues are here grounded, and realistic. We see Delilah, ‘a real bruiser’, and Judith’s maidservant bagging Holofernes’ head, two nods to a pioneering woman in the permanent collection, Artemisia Gentileschi – and another subject to rape early in her career.
These women are solid, present beings – working, sweeping, sitting on the floor painting. There are women educating women, and women reading, and none of the patronising tone of similar works from the early 20th century. No-one is static; even the brownish, terracotta-clay-like statues, pulsate with life. On the far right, the history side, a top-hatted man blurs into the background, fleeing by the stairs.
Movement too permeates Rego’s work and practice; she describes her residency in the National Gallery’s basement studios like that of a scurrying animal. ‘I could creep upstairs and snatch at things, and bring them down with me to the basement, where I could munch away at them. And what I brought down here from upstairs varied a lot, but I always brought something into my den.’
For its vast scale, the detail is phenomenal, with fantastical figures from swans to storks, horned figures and frogs on leads. Animals - and their theatre – play out in her contemporary practice, with the Girl and Dog series (1986), and ‘Dog Women’ (1994) too. (A full Character Key can be found by QR code.)
Hued blue, white, and black, the colours of Portuguese tiles, the whole thing is also an homage to Lisbon. Less obvious are the clunky leather boots of the Virgin Mary and her cousin, Elizabeth, which could recall ‘The Policeman’s Daughter’ (1983), Rego’s image of a sturdy young woman with her fist up the jackboot of a servant of the Portuguese military dictatorship.
‘Crivelli’s Garden’ was first designed and installed in the Dining Rooms, where Rego hoped people would revisit and sit with the work. The reality was somewhat different; her colleague and close friend Colin Wiggins celebrates that the work has been ‘liberated’ from poor lighting and the ‘splattering with gravy’. Some restoration was necessary though, taking inspiration again from those tiles, Rego had the foresight to use near wipe-clean acrylic paint.
With studies, drawings, and so much of Rego in her own words, it’s almost as though the artist is present. We get to the heart of her practice with grid lines and pencil works, testaments to the meticulous planning that went into the composition of this imaginary, fantasy-filled work. It culminates in a warm space, a wonder to behold. Rego’s mural may have been inspired by an Italian altarpiece, but only she could make a churchgoer of me.
The artist’s death in June 2022 only makes this exhibition – the first to display both works in conversation, a prospect that particularly excited the artist – all the more poignant. Rego is one of the most important artists of her generation, as much, if not more so, than Francis Bacon or Lucien Freud. But too often, she’s reduced to (great) temporary exhibitions, from the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, to Tate Britain.
So keep ‘Crivelli’s Garden’ on free and permanent display – and keep it clean! It’s the least we can do to pay tribute to a work which pays so much tribute to others.
Paula Rego: Crivelli's Garden is on view in Room 46 of the National Gallery in London until 29 October 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
‘As a woman, I couldn’t find anything in there of interest to me,’ Paula Rego once said of the National Gallery’s permanent collection. Then, she reconsidered. ‘As a woman, I can surely find things to work with’. How glad I am she did for, without doing so, I wouldn’t get the chance to spend time in ‘Crivelli’s Garden’ (1990-1991), a ten-metre-long tribute to everything Rego held dear – now restored and on display.
Dame Paula Rego was a Portuguese-British visual artist, best known for her paintings and prints based on storytelling. Her parents were keen Anglophiles, and ardent anti-fascists, critical of Portugal's right-wing dictator António Salazar; in 1951, she was sent to finishing school in Kent, and whilst she continued to practice in the UK, her works were coloured by folk themes and traditions from her native Portugal.
Rego initially rejected the offer to be the National’s first Associate Artist in the 1980s, on the basis of their ‘masculine’ collection. This monumental, multi-panelled mural is a response to the predella panel of Carlo Crivelli’s 15th century altarpiece ‘La Madonna della Rondine’. Within it, the artist reimagines the narratives of women in biblical and mythological history, folklore, from the medieval Golden Legend.
The result positions Rego as both a woman and a European painter, two identities implied mutually exclusive by the permanent collection. I warm to rare archive photographs of the young artist in Portugal, where I might spend time with her as a living person, rather than the artistic icon and Dame I first met in the museum. Passing an hour (or three) in ‘Crivelli’s Garden’, I simply couldn’t stop smiling.
It’s similarly populated by staff from the National Gallery – many of whom were still there when I visited! – and the artist’s family and friends. There’s the lecturer, Lizzie Perrotte, as Mary Magdalene. Erika Langmuir, Head of Learning, as the Storyteller, and her then junior colleague, Ailsa Bhattacharya, the Reader as the start and anchor figure.
‘Crivelli’s Garden’ is certainly a celebration of storytelling, of paintings as ‘active’, continuous stories which are constantly being created in conversation with their viewers. Rego reinterprets conventional narratives from the past and present, much like Nalini Malani, the Gallery’s first contemporary fellow recently on display down the corridor.
Her saints and statues are here grounded, and realistic. We see Delilah, ‘a real bruiser’, and Judith’s maidservant bagging Holofernes’ head, two nods to a pioneering woman in the permanent collection, Artemisia Gentileschi – and another subject to rape early in her career.
These women are solid, present beings – working, sweeping, sitting on the floor painting. There are women educating women, and women reading, and none of the patronising tone of similar works from the early 20th century. No-one is static; even the brownish, terracotta-clay-like statues, pulsate with life. On the far right, the history side, a top-hatted man blurs into the background, fleeing by the stairs.
Movement too permeates Rego’s work and practice; she describes her residency in the National Gallery’s basement studios like that of a scurrying animal. ‘I could creep upstairs and snatch at things, and bring them down with me to the basement, where I could munch away at them. And what I brought down here from upstairs varied a lot, but I always brought something into my den.’
For its vast scale, the detail is phenomenal, with fantastical figures from swans to storks, horned figures and frogs on leads. Animals - and their theatre – play out in her contemporary practice, with the Girl and Dog series (1986), and ‘Dog Women’ (1994) too. (A full Character Key can be found by QR code.)
Hued blue, white, and black, the colours of Portuguese tiles, the whole thing is also an homage to Lisbon. Less obvious are the clunky leather boots of the Virgin Mary and her cousin, Elizabeth, which could recall ‘The Policeman’s Daughter’ (1983), Rego’s image of a sturdy young woman with her fist up the jackboot of a servant of the Portuguese military dictatorship.
‘Crivelli’s Garden’ was first designed and installed in the Dining Rooms, where Rego hoped people would revisit and sit with the work. The reality was somewhat different; her colleague and close friend Colin Wiggins celebrates that the work has been ‘liberated’ from poor lighting and the ‘splattering with gravy’. Some restoration was necessary though, taking inspiration again from those tiles, Rego had the foresight to use near wipe-clean acrylic paint.
With studies, drawings, and so much of Rego in her own words, it’s almost as though the artist is present. We get to the heart of her practice with grid lines and pencil works, testaments to the meticulous planning that went into the composition of this imaginary, fantasy-filled work. It culminates in a warm space, a wonder to behold. Rego’s mural may have been inspired by an Italian altarpiece, but only she could make a churchgoer of me.
The artist’s death in June 2022 only makes this exhibition – the first to display both works in conversation, a prospect that particularly excited the artist – all the more poignant. Rego is one of the most important artists of her generation, as much, if not more so, than Francis Bacon or Lucien Freud. But too often, she’s reduced to (great) temporary exhibitions, from the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, to Tate Britain.
So keep ‘Crivelli’s Garden’ on free and permanent display – and keep it clean! It’s the least we can do to pay tribute to a work which pays so much tribute to others.
Paula Rego: Crivelli's Garden is on view in Room 46 of the National Gallery in London until 29 October 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
‘As a woman, I couldn’t find anything in there of interest to me,’ Paula Rego once said of the National Gallery’s permanent collection. Then, she reconsidered. ‘As a woman, I can surely find things to work with’. How glad I am she did for, without doing so, I wouldn’t get the chance to spend time in ‘Crivelli’s Garden’ (1990-1991), a ten-metre-long tribute to everything Rego held dear – now restored and on display.
Dame Paula Rego was a Portuguese-British visual artist, best known for her paintings and prints based on storytelling. Her parents were keen Anglophiles, and ardent anti-fascists, critical of Portugal's right-wing dictator António Salazar; in 1951, she was sent to finishing school in Kent, and whilst she continued to practice in the UK, her works were coloured by folk themes and traditions from her native Portugal.
Rego initially rejected the offer to be the National’s first Associate Artist in the 1980s, on the basis of their ‘masculine’ collection. This monumental, multi-panelled mural is a response to the predella panel of Carlo Crivelli’s 15th century altarpiece ‘La Madonna della Rondine’. Within it, the artist reimagines the narratives of women in biblical and mythological history, folklore, from the medieval Golden Legend.
The result positions Rego as both a woman and a European painter, two identities implied mutually exclusive by the permanent collection. I warm to rare archive photographs of the young artist in Portugal, where I might spend time with her as a living person, rather than the artistic icon and Dame I first met in the museum. Passing an hour (or three) in ‘Crivelli’s Garden’, I simply couldn’t stop smiling.
It’s similarly populated by staff from the National Gallery – many of whom were still there when I visited! – and the artist’s family and friends. There’s the lecturer, Lizzie Perrotte, as Mary Magdalene. Erika Langmuir, Head of Learning, as the Storyteller, and her then junior colleague, Ailsa Bhattacharya, the Reader as the start and anchor figure.
‘Crivelli’s Garden’ is certainly a celebration of storytelling, of paintings as ‘active’, continuous stories which are constantly being created in conversation with their viewers. Rego reinterprets conventional narratives from the past and present, much like Nalini Malani, the Gallery’s first contemporary fellow recently on display down the corridor.
Her saints and statues are here grounded, and realistic. We see Delilah, ‘a real bruiser’, and Judith’s maidservant bagging Holofernes’ head, two nods to a pioneering woman in the permanent collection, Artemisia Gentileschi – and another subject to rape early in her career.
These women are solid, present beings – working, sweeping, sitting on the floor painting. There are women educating women, and women reading, and none of the patronising tone of similar works from the early 20th century. No-one is static; even the brownish, terracotta-clay-like statues, pulsate with life. On the far right, the history side, a top-hatted man blurs into the background, fleeing by the stairs.
Movement too permeates Rego’s work and practice; she describes her residency in the National Gallery’s basement studios like that of a scurrying animal. ‘I could creep upstairs and snatch at things, and bring them down with me to the basement, where I could munch away at them. And what I brought down here from upstairs varied a lot, but I always brought something into my den.’
For its vast scale, the detail is phenomenal, with fantastical figures from swans to storks, horned figures and frogs on leads. Animals - and their theatre – play out in her contemporary practice, with the Girl and Dog series (1986), and ‘Dog Women’ (1994) too. (A full Character Key can be found by QR code.)
Hued blue, white, and black, the colours of Portuguese tiles, the whole thing is also an homage to Lisbon. Less obvious are the clunky leather boots of the Virgin Mary and her cousin, Elizabeth, which could recall ‘The Policeman’s Daughter’ (1983), Rego’s image of a sturdy young woman with her fist up the jackboot of a servant of the Portuguese military dictatorship.
‘Crivelli’s Garden’ was first designed and installed in the Dining Rooms, where Rego hoped people would revisit and sit with the work. The reality was somewhat different; her colleague and close friend Colin Wiggins celebrates that the work has been ‘liberated’ from poor lighting and the ‘splattering with gravy’. Some restoration was necessary though, taking inspiration again from those tiles, Rego had the foresight to use near wipe-clean acrylic paint.
With studies, drawings, and so much of Rego in her own words, it’s almost as though the artist is present. We get to the heart of her practice with grid lines and pencil works, testaments to the meticulous planning that went into the composition of this imaginary, fantasy-filled work. It culminates in a warm space, a wonder to behold. Rego’s mural may have been inspired by an Italian altarpiece, but only she could make a churchgoer of me.
The artist’s death in June 2022 only makes this exhibition – the first to display both works in conversation, a prospect that particularly excited the artist – all the more poignant. Rego is one of the most important artists of her generation, as much, if not more so, than Francis Bacon or Lucien Freud. But too often, she’s reduced to (great) temporary exhibitions, from the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, to Tate Britain.
So keep ‘Crivelli’s Garden’ on free and permanent display – and keep it clean! It’s the least we can do to pay tribute to a work which pays so much tribute to others.
Paula Rego: Crivelli's Garden is on view in Room 46 of the National Gallery in London until 29 October 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
