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Lot Essay
Paula Rego’s luminous pastel Maria Moisés (2001) takes its subject from the eponymous Portuguese novella by Camilo Castelo Branco, published between 1876 and 1877. Rego depicts the titular character’s mother, Josefa da Lage, moments after childbirth. She lies on a riverbed exhausted, barely clinging to a willow tree. Her twisted body is powerful, drawn with bold lines of pastel that parallel the dense cross-hatching of the solid tree trunk. The river flows in smoother and wider sweeps of chalky green, lapping over her bare legs. The setting’s hazy intangibility is suffused with moments of sharp tension. Josefa’s right hand bleeds a subtle orange tinge into the water; her left hand claws down the tree bark before finding a tight-fisted grip; her feet drift towards us in strongly foreshortened perspective. White flowers on a bright green stem descend from the top of the picture, indicating new life coming into bloom.
First exhibited in 2001 at the pioneering Galeria 111 in Porto, Maria Moisés was the only pastel in a series of five works—the others were ink or graphite drawings—inspired by the novella. The work entered the collection and remained in the family of Rego’s longtime supporter and gallerist in Portugal, Manuel de Brito (1928-2005). Rego’s narrative subjects continue to impress with their urgency, honesty, and relevance: following her landmark Tate Britain retrospective in 2021-2022, the artist’s largest in the UK to date, her work is presently the subject of a major solo exhibition at the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway.
The novella Maria Moisés is a tale in two halves. Josefa, a poor young woman from rural Minho in northern Portugal, falls in love with António de Queirós, the son of the local aristocrat. Josefa falls pregnant, gives birth in secret, flees, and drowns in a river trying to rescue her newborn daughter who floats to safety in a basket. The child is found and named Maria Moisés (the Portuguese name for Moses). She later redeems the mother and reconciles with her father through acts of charity and selflessness. Taking Josefa as her subject, Rego offers her own form of redemption. She unflinchingly acknowledges the mother in the moment of her greatest suffering, solitude and sacrifice.
Rego’s drawing in pastel is vigorous but tender. She preferred the medium from the mid-1990s onwards for its tactility, which brought her closer to the subjects she empathised with: ‘the changing it, the pushing it around, shoving it, makes it come alive … It’s more haptic. You’re actually making it with your hand’ (P. Rego in conversation with M. Livingstone, in Paula Rego, exh. cat. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid 2007, pp. 192-193). In Maria Moisés, there is a poignant immediacy to her mark-making: by this point Rego would draw her larger works directly in pastel without relying on preparatory studies. She works out Josefa’s figure live on the page. Subtle pentimenti show Rego repositioning her submerged legs and the lower hem of her dress. The white flowers, hanging above, delicately foreshadow Josefa’s tragic death and her daughter’s survival through the mother’s sacrifice.
Rego often found inspiration in fictional narratives, where she could investigate and expose moments of stark injustice, particularly those inflicted upon women. Literature was a point of departure from which to go further than the source material—often written by a man—and to address the present. ‘I use literature as a vehicle to go somewhere else’, said Rego. ‘I don’t do it even to do the literature justice. I use it like you put on a coat, and then to stand the cold, and then you can go out and there it is’ (ibid., p. 194). With the present work Josefa enters Rego’s pantheon of fictional female heroines, joining Jane Eyre (2002), Jenufa, from the opera by Leoš Janáček (1995), and Amélia from Eça de Queirós’s nineteenth-century novel The Sin of Father Amaro (1997-1998). Josefa’s plight revisits the anguish and strength of the women from Rego’s celebrated series of pastels on the subject of abortion (1998-1999), and anticipates her bold reimagining of the life of the Virgin Mary for the chapel of Lisbon’s Palácio Nacional de Belém (2002). Stories, Rego explained, were conduits for her imagination: ‘The greatest problem all my life has been the inability to speak my mind … therefore the flight into storytelling. You paint to fight injustice’ (P. Rego quoted in J. McEwen, Paula Rego, London 1992, p. 17).
First exhibited in 2001 at the pioneering Galeria 111 in Porto, Maria Moisés was the only pastel in a series of five works—the others were ink or graphite drawings—inspired by the novella. The work entered the collection and remained in the family of Rego’s longtime supporter and gallerist in Portugal, Manuel de Brito (1928-2005). Rego’s narrative subjects continue to impress with their urgency, honesty, and relevance: following her landmark Tate Britain retrospective in 2021-2022, the artist’s largest in the UK to date, her work is presently the subject of a major solo exhibition at the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway.
The novella Maria Moisés is a tale in two halves. Josefa, a poor young woman from rural Minho in northern Portugal, falls in love with António de Queirós, the son of the local aristocrat. Josefa falls pregnant, gives birth in secret, flees, and drowns in a river trying to rescue her newborn daughter who floats to safety in a basket. The child is found and named Maria Moisés (the Portuguese name for Moses). She later redeems the mother and reconciles with her father through acts of charity and selflessness. Taking Josefa as her subject, Rego offers her own form of redemption. She unflinchingly acknowledges the mother in the moment of her greatest suffering, solitude and sacrifice.
Rego’s drawing in pastel is vigorous but tender. She preferred the medium from the mid-1990s onwards for its tactility, which brought her closer to the subjects she empathised with: ‘the changing it, the pushing it around, shoving it, makes it come alive … It’s more haptic. You’re actually making it with your hand’ (P. Rego in conversation with M. Livingstone, in Paula Rego, exh. cat. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid 2007, pp. 192-193). In Maria Moisés, there is a poignant immediacy to her mark-making: by this point Rego would draw her larger works directly in pastel without relying on preparatory studies. She works out Josefa’s figure live on the page. Subtle pentimenti show Rego repositioning her submerged legs and the lower hem of her dress. The white flowers, hanging above, delicately foreshadow Josefa’s tragic death and her daughter’s survival through the mother’s sacrifice.
Rego often found inspiration in fictional narratives, where she could investigate and expose moments of stark injustice, particularly those inflicted upon women. Literature was a point of departure from which to go further than the source material—often written by a man—and to address the present. ‘I use literature as a vehicle to go somewhere else’, said Rego. ‘I don’t do it even to do the literature justice. I use it like you put on a coat, and then to stand the cold, and then you can go out and there it is’ (ibid., p. 194). With the present work Josefa enters Rego’s pantheon of fictional female heroines, joining Jane Eyre (2002), Jenufa, from the opera by Leoš Janáček (1995), and Amélia from Eça de Queirós’s nineteenth-century novel The Sin of Father Amaro (1997-1998). Josefa’s plight revisits the anguish and strength of the women from Rego’s celebrated series of pastels on the subject of abortion (1998-1999), and anticipates her bold reimagining of the life of the Virgin Mary for the chapel of Lisbon’s Palácio Nacional de Belém (2002). Stories, Rego explained, were conduits for her imagination: ‘The greatest problem all my life has been the inability to speak my mind … therefore the flight into storytelling. You paint to fight injustice’ (P. Rego quoted in J. McEwen, Paula Rego, London 1992, p. 17).