Paula Rego

Maria Paula Figueiroa Rego was born on 26 January 1935 in Lisbon, Portugal. She attended St Julian's School in Carcavelos before being sent to a finishing school in Kent, England, at age sixteen. She then studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London from 1952 to 1956. In 1959 she married the painter Victor Willing, with whom she had three children, including Victoria and Nick; Willing died in 1988.

Rego's first major solo exhibition in London was held at AIR Gallery in 1981, followed by shows at the Fundacao Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon and the Serpentine Gallery in London, both in 1988. She was the National Gallery's second artist in residence in 1989, then became the gallery's first Associate Artist, a newly created title, in 1990, painting murals for the Sainsbury Wing restaurant in 1991 and becoming, in 1992, the first living artist given a dedicated exhibition there. Her work turned repeatedly to storybook and fairy-tale sources reworked into scenes of domestic tension and female experience, including the "Dog Women" series begun in 1994, a series on abortion made in 1998 to 1999, and a series addressing female genital mutilation made in 2008 to 2009.

She was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2010, and in 2016 became a Senior Royal Academician at the Royal Academy of Arts. In 2009 the Portuguese government opened the Casa das Historias Paula Rego in Cascais, a museum designed by architect Eduardo Souto de Moura and dedicated entirely to her work. A major retrospective originated at Tate Britain in 2021 and traveled to the Kunstmuseum Den Haag and the Museo Picasso Malaga through 2022.

Paula Rego died on 8 June 2022 at her home in North London, after a short illness, at the age of 87. She was buried at Hampstead Cemetery alongside Victor Willing.

Rego's work has long drawn particular attention from feminist critics, including Germaine Greer and Marina Warner, for its unflinching treatment of women's interior lives, sexuality, and subjugation, delivered through a deceptively storybook visual language. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has described her practice as deeply political, noting how she used narrative and folk sources to confront subjects such as abortion, domestic violence, and female genital mutilation directly rather than allegorically. Institutional recognition, from her National Gallery residency in 1989 to 1990 through the 2021 to 2022 Tate Britain retrospective, has consistently framed her as a central figure in postwar British and Portuguese figurative painting rather than a regional or niche one.

Rego's auction market has climbed in stages since her death. In 2015 her painting The Cadet and His Sister sold at Sotheby's London for about GBP 1,140,000, then a record for the artist. That record was surpassed in 2023, when a work from her Dancing Ostriches series sold at Christie's for about GBP 3,000,000, and again on 15 October 2025, when Dancing Ostriches from Walt Disney's "Fantasia" sold at Christie's London for GBP 3,466,000, a new all-time high for the artist. Her prints are handled by Cristea Roberts Gallery, and her paintings have been represented by Marlborough Fine Art since the late 1980s, with Galerie Lelong & Co. in Paris and Victoria Miro in London also mounting recurring solo exhibitions of her work.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Rego, so provenance and verification depend on her representing galleries, Marlborough Fine Art and Cristea Roberts Gallery, and on the archive held at the Casa das Historias Paula Rego in Cascais, which holds more than 200 of her prints along with drawings and paintings. Her auction high has moved up twice in the past three years, from about GBP 3,000,000 in 2023 to GBP 3,466,000 in 2025, which points to strengthening demand at the top of her market, though the number of works reaching that level at auction remains small. Prints, a large and well-documented part of her output, are a more liquid and better-tracked entry point than her rarer large-scale paintings and pastels.