The book being read in this picture is a limited edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy with etchings by Gustave Doré. It was a book that Rego’s grandfather bought in 1890 and has been in the family ever since. During her childhood, Rego and her father would look at the book together. She sets the scene in Estoril, its beach glimpsed through a window, with narratives within the picture suggesting episodes by turns domestic and uncanny. Writing in the accompanying publication, Deborah Levy notes that ‘This morphing of realism and surrealism gives equal status to the ordinary and the extraordinary, in which, as ever, the artist is also working with fragments of memory.’

About the artist

Born in 1935 in Lisbon, Portugal, Dame Paula Rego RA lives and works in London. The largest and most comprehensive retrospective of Rego’s work to date commenced this year at Tate Britain (7 July–24 October 2021) and will travel to Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Netherlands (27 November 2021–20 March 2022) followed by Museo Picasso Malagá, Spain.

Other current and recent major solo exhibitions include Museum De Reede, Antwerp, Belgium (30 July–25 October 2021), and Paula Rego: Obedience and Defiance, curated by Catherine Lampert, which travelled from MK Gallery, Milton Keynes to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh in 2019–2020 and was on view at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin from September 2020–May 2021. Rego’s work is in the collections of major museums including the British Museum, London, UK; National Gallery, London, UK; National Portrait Gallery, London, UK; Tate, UK and the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, UK.