Paula Rego

Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., London

Acquired from the above by the present owner 

Plymouth, Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery; Middlesbrough, Middlesbrough Art Gallery; Manchester, Whitworth Art Gallery; Barnsley, Cooper Art Gallery; and London, The National Gallery, Paula Rego: Tales from the National Gallery, 1991, n.p., illustrated in colour

Jerusalem, Spertus Gallery, British Figurative Painting of the 20th Century, 1992-93, no. 14

John McEwen, Paula Rego, London 1992, p. 185, no. 179, illustrated  in colour

Maria Manuel Lisboa, Paula Rego's Map of Memory: National and Sexual Politics, Burlington 2003, p. 79, no. 30, illustrated 

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is slightly cooler in the original, the black of the male figure's suit has more blue in it and the grey floor and walls tend more towards blue. Condition: This work is in very good condition. The work is laid down on canvas. There are artists pinholes in a few places and a minute speck of loss approximately 13cm from the centre of the left hand edge. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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A masterful work of psychological and symbolic intensity, The Bullfighter’s Godmother is Paula Rego at her dramatic finest: a deeply human and poignant painting that illustrates a parable of contradictions, doubling familial love with power, and affection with domination. Completed immediately preceding Rego’s appointment as the very first Associate Artist of the National Gallery, London, in 1990 – the museum’s artist-in-residence programme initiated that year – the present work marks a seminal moment in Rego’s critically celebrated career. Two years prior, in 1988, Rego had been catapulted onto the international art scene: the artist was taken on by Marlborough Fine Art Gallery, London, and honoured with a major retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery. This period similarly saw a notable shift in Rego’s style. Moving away from the flat, graphic surfaces of her earlier collage works, the artist pulled back towards a much tighter, linear style of figurative modelling that is reminiscent of the highly wrought drawing technique taught to her as a student at the Slade School of Fine Art, where emphasis was on teaching from a life model. Moreover, with its dramatic compositional organisation, rich, dark tones and shadowy theatricality, The Bullfighter’s Godmother is a remarkable precursor to Rego’s later works inspired by the National Gallery’s collection, such as the present work’s companion piece, The Fitting, completed as part of her residency.

In The Bullfighter’s Godmother, Rego takes on the long art historical tradition of matador paintings, from Velázquez and Goya to Manet and Picasso. Rather than focusing on the heroism and dynamism of the bullfight, Rego fixed her inimitable artistic vision on the personal tragedy that unfolds behind closed doors, away from the public spectacle of the bullring. The two protagonists stand in a bare, monastic room, as the godmother puts the finishing touches to her charge’s bullfighting outfit, while a young girl sits in a chair with the bullfighter’s traditional cape draped over her knees. The room is windowless and, although spacious, dark, and claustrophobic. Its shadows have an ominous character, potentially reiterating the motif of a last farewell. There is a palpable atmosphere of foreboding, in which the godmother’s black clothes, customarily associated with mourning, provide an uneasy counter to the blood red of the cape, chair and waistband. The curator of Rego’s National Gallery exhibition, Colin Wiggins, has even suggested that the little girl is Death’s goddaughter, with the sinister, almost gleeful, expression on her face intimating the fate she is planning (Colin Wiggins in: Exh. Cat., Plymouth, Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery (and travelling), Paula Rego: Tales from the National Gallery, 1991, p. 12).

Rego grew up in Portugal in the 1930s and 1940s under the repressive dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar; the present work engages with this history in both overt subject matter, and the more subtle tensions between the bullfighter and his godmother. Traditionally, bullfighting is recognised as the purest distillation of masculine values, and is synonymous with conservative nationalism – the keystone of Salazar’s brutal dictatorship. In a manner that appears to undermine the symbolic masculinity of the matador, the domineering godmother towers over the young bullfighter in Rego’s painting; his feeble attitude is antithetical to the traditionally formidable trope of the bullfighter, even prompting one critic to call him “a shrunken figure out of Manet,” at the time of the work’s exhibition (Andrew Graham-Dixon, ‘Poacher’s Pie’, The Independent, 7 January 1992, online).

As in all of Rego’s paintings however things are never what they seem. Although familiar, the iconography of her works can never quite be pinned down: the characters have a folklorish aura, but always elude precise identification. Whilst Rego’s early works are distinguished for the influence of Surrealist automatism, paintings such as The Bullfighter’s Godmother remain heady with the narrative inspiration of Surrealism’s masters. The long shadows and architectural linearity of the room’s interior recall the mysterious, perspectival distortions of de Chirico, whereas the mood is distinctly Dalí. The characters and scenes within the paintings often have very specific identities and meanings for the artist. In order to instil her works with a heightened sense of reality, Rego modelled her subjects from real life. Indeed, the room depicted in the present work is in fact a hotel room in Madrid, where Rego once stayed with her husband, the revered British artist Victor Willing, who died in 1988. It is this ability to imbue her work with the emotional candour of her personal experience that sets Rego’s paintings apart: works that explore the disquieting facets of human nature with a unique emotive potency. Rather than preventing the viewer from engaging with the work, however, the narrative enigmas of Rego’s paintings allow us to project our own emotions onto the work, to make it our own. As the artist says, “that’s the wonderful thing about pictures, you can always make up your own story” (Paula Rego quoted in: Exh. Cat., Plymouth, op. cit., p. 17).