Paula Rego

The story at the heart of the painting came to Paula Rego ready-made in the form of Jean Genet’s play The Maids (1947), itself based on the real-life case of the Papin sisters, Christine and Lea, who worked as maids for a rich Parisian family…

Audio interview.

Works in the Tate collection

Artworks.

Rego says. ‘It’s actually a dummy that they use in hospitals to train nurses to give injections, so you see he has breasts, too, and you can put a wig on him to make him a woman.’ Crowded on a table is a collection of plaster saints and plastic Virgins. There are railings and shelves crammed with antique clothes; a giant Alice in Wonderland chair; an eerily lifelike sheepdog, made by Rego’s son-in-law, the artist Ron Mueck; a papier-mâché skeleton that looks as if it has danced out of a procession for the Mexican Day of the Dead. A severed head rests in a sink. (Her grandchildren, Rego says, help with the papier-mâché.) She picks up a small, furry animal dressed in a Victorian nightdress. ‘Jane Eyre’s monkey,’ she says affectionately. At least, I think that’s what she says…