Paula Rego

The latest parcel from those dependable people at Amazon contained a copy of Paula Rego: The Complete Graphic Work. This volume collects all of Rego’s etchings, lithographs and screenprints: it’s a lovely book, and I couldn’t resist scanning a few of the images therein…

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The first four pictures are from Rego’s recent set of lithographs illustrating Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre. The first image (above) is of Jane herself, and the second portrays Mr Rochester: in order to capture this scene, Rego apparently asked her model, dressed in period costume, to sit atop a life-size plastic horse posed next to a stuffed dog. The third image, below, is a strikingly imaginative way of showing Jane finding solace & escape by studying Bewick’s History of British Birds. In the fourth image (strongly reminiscent, to me, of Goya) we see Jane alone at night, having left Rochester’s house, knowing she cannot marry him…

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The remaining two images, below, are from earlier series of etchings: the first is one of Rego’s ‘Nursery Rhymes’, which I previously mentioned here, and the second is one of four crow-themed etchings made in 1994. I especially love the way that Rego has rendered the night sky in these two works.

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Click on the thumbnails above to see them much enlarged: note that the full images are all 500Kb+, and may take a little while to download. These works are are Copyright © Paula Rego, and are reproduced without permission, only for as long as nobody objects to their presence here.