Dead men hang from tree stumps watched impassively by a lounging soldier. A child weeps as her stricken mother is carried away from the tumult of war. A grieving wife holds the dying husband she cannot bear to let go; a soldier seizes a woman unaware that he is about to be stabbed in the back by a vengeful mother.
Scenes of violence and despair, abject sorrow and pain. These are the images by the Spanish genius Francisco de Goya which the Portuguese artist Paula Rego hung above her bed. They must have permeated her dreams; they have certainly influenced her work.
Goya created the etchings towards the end of his life (1746–1828) when he was overwhelmed with despair – and anger – at the political repression and the horrors of conflict that gripped Spain in the early 19th century.
An unusual exhibition at the Holburne Museum in Bath attempts to connect the inspiration Rego drew from the Spaniard’s works in Uncanny Visions: Paula Rego and Francisco de Goya by setting Rego’s series of more than 30 etchings of Nursery Rhymes alongside Goya’s Los disparates (The Follies).
One can certainly agree that both artists produced “uncanny” works, though the word does not quite do justice to either. Not to the devastating, visual diatribes of Goya nor to Rego’s satirical, fiercely feminist, anti-establishment fantasy world.
Goya drew The Follies between 1815 and 1823, but they were so controversial that they were not published until 1864, 60 years after he sought exile from the convulsions of his home country in Bordeaux, France.
Rego, who died in 2022 aged 87, began work on Nursery Rhymes in 1989, the year after her husband died, partly to entertain her two-year-old granddaughter, Carmen, who would have been happily unaware of their undercurrents of incest, vanity, violence and even cruelty to children.
She would have been too little to make anything of the boy being beaten in The Old Woman who Lived in a Shoe, unaware of the oddly sinister girl smirking while soldiers gather around the shattered remains of Humpty Dumpty. The dancers in Ring-a-Ring-a’ Roses give no clue that the roses signalled the onset of the bubonic plague and that the finale “We all fall down” means death.
In Polly Put the Kettle On, Rego portrays herself as Polly serving tea with another woman to soldiers half their size. How could Carmen have known that the soldiers are made of chocolate – and they are, in fact, the tea-time treat for Polly and pal?
It’s easy to overlook the horrors in some of these familiar lines. Rego made two images of A Frog He Would A-Wooing Go. One has a splendidly pompous Frog with two ratty chums that would add charm to any children’s book, the other a brutal depiction of three killings that clashes horribly with the rollicking chorus.
But then, as WH Auden said: “There are no good books which are only for children.”
Throughout, the influence of illustrators such as John Tenniel, Beatrix Potter, Arthur Rackham, even William Hogarth, is evident, but it is with Goya that we are invited to compare Rego’s rhymes, and that’s where things get problematic.
Take Three Blind Mice. Grotesque creatures more like rats, with razor sharp teeth and dead white eyes, attack a woman but she fights back, knives flailing. Alongside is the huge grinning figure of Goya’s The Simpleton. It’s carnival time, he’s playing the castanets and it should be fun, but while he dances two ghostly heads emerge from the shadows. Are they screaming? Shouting? A frightened man hides behind a helpless female figure. That grin is more a demonic grimace.
One of Rego’s more unsettling works is Baa Baa Black Sheep, in which a child seems to be pressing up against the animal – Rego made it a ram – in an embrace. The darkness of the piece is exaggerated because of a mistake in printing that made the etching blacker than planned but, however disturbing it is, Goya’s Unbridled Folly or The Horse Abductor, hung alongside, is altogether more compelling. A horse rears up against a doom-laden sky, all muscles and wild eyes, a symbol of lust, intent on carrying off a woman, something she seems to quite relish. In the background huge, terrifying rats skulk around, one of which is eating a woman.
Rego represents Ladybird, Ladybird, a poem that might be about the persecution of Catholics in England, with the ladybird fluttering overhead symbolising the Virgin Mary, by staging a stately gavotte danced by elegant ladies and strangely decorous but alarming insects.
In Goya’s Exhortations a wild-eyed woman, clearly terrified, is pulled around by a flurry of figures, one of them has three arms, some have two heads, another stands, finger raised in admonition. The curator’s note suggests that the scene is a “metaphor for the choice between vice and virtue, lust and chastity”, but the overriding effect is of tumult and terror.
Perhaps it is unfair to compare the two – something that’s hard to avoid given the way the exhibition is organised. Rego was to an extent circumscribed by the theme she chose, though obviously attracted by the subversive undertones of the rhymes.
Goya’s view of the world was sweeping, apocalyptic. In the 22 etchings of The Follies he drew on the deep, sombre corners of his imagination to produce a scathing and haunting denunciation of his homeland.
What to make of the show? It’s a treat to see such rarely shown works, and to that extent it’s an intriguing diversion, but putting like with unlike suggests we have to decide between the two.
Both play heavily on the surreal, but should we prefer what Auden described as “A magical convergence: the absurdity of English nonsense illustrated by Rego’s marvellously dark fantastical drawings… Anyone will thrill to these”?
Little Miss Muffet fits that billing. Rego made three versions of the arachnophobic psychodrama, two of which find Miss M distinctly disturbed by the creature, but in one she gives the spider quite a kicking. It’s a splendid scene, one of the few in colour, and given a particular piquancy when you realise the creature has her mother’s face. A disturbing aside, and one that acknowledges Rego’s difficult relationship with her mother. Nonetheless, it’s more fun than fearful.
Poor Folly is deemed to be similar to Little Miss Muffet, sharing “a sense of impending doom with its terrified woman is running into a building, a church perhaps. Why does she have two heads? Is she looking to the past and to the future? Are the men behind her a threat? Why is one of them screaming? A gaggle of old women, grim and ghostly, lurk. Are they urging her on or driving her to a terrible fate?
It could also be an allegory for Spain itself, fleeing from the terrible past of the Peninsular war in which more than 200,000 perished, but uncertain as to what the future might bring. There really is no comparison to Miss M. This is a world without pity and with little hope.
Perhaps Aldous Huxley writing in 1962 captured Goya’s virtuosity as well as any; the way he created “the most powerful of commentaries on human crime and madness… uniquely fitted to express that extraordinary mingling of hatred and compassion, despair and sardonic humour, realism and fantasy.” Much the same could be said of Paula Rego.
Uncanny Visions: Paula Rego and Francisco de Goya is at the Holburne Museum, Bath, until January 5, 2025
