Paula Rego, one of the most significant artists of the 20th and 21st centuries
Paula Rego was brave, unapologetic, and determined to succeed in the male-dominated art world in which she rose to fame, and these are all qualities reflected in her works. Her art can be by turns whimsical and terrifying, beautiful and grotesque, tender and brutal, but it is always driven by a strong sense of narrative, justice, and fortitude.
Interest in Paula Rego’s work has dramatically increased since her 2021 retrospective at the Tate. Rego died in 2022, but 2023 saw more of her work sold at auction than at any other time in the last two decades. Her art is especially popular in her native Portugal and in the UK, which she adopted as a second home, and her prints account for 72% of her work sold at auction, with the majority fetching between £1,000 and £5,000.
According to Paul Coldwell, who helped Rego create many of her prints, “each [Rego] print is a painting in miniature, and anyone who owns one has something very special.” If you own one of the artist’s prints and would like to find out more about how to sell it, get in touch with Mark Littler today. Below is a list of Paula Rego’s most sought-after prints.
Free Specialist Print Valuations
Please use the form below to submit images of your print and receive a free, no-obligation valuation from a specialist auctioneer. We will also actively seek the highest offer from our network of private collectors to help you sell your print.
"*" indicates required fields
Nursery Rhymes
This complete set of 25 etchings and aquatints was sold by Bonhams in November 2013 for £20,000. The series reflects Paula Rego’s lifelong love of folk stories, nurtured by spending her early years in Portugal in the care of her grandmother, who passed on traditional folk tales to her. On the surface, many of the Nursery Rhymes prints are whimsical and fantastical, allowing the artist’s imagination to run free, and illustrating her belief that “playing is the most important thing of all.” Yet in typical Rego style, there is a darker, slightly sinister edge to many of the prints, too, which is unsurprising, given their creator once said she made art “to give fear a face.”
Nursery Rhymes Sold by Bonhams in 2013
Untitled (The Abortion Series)
Paula Rego is perhaps best-known for her harrowing Abortion Series, created in pastels in 1998 as a furious response to a Portuguese referendum which failed to decriminalise abortion. The artist has always been outspoken about her views on the subject, arguing: “it is unbelievable that women who have an abortion should be considered criminals… What each woman suffers in having to do it is enough.”
The series – depicting various women in backstreet abortion clinics – was highly controversial, and it showed Rego’s willingness to confront difficult themes, taboo subjects, and social injustice with unflinching honesty and tenderness. Unusually for Rego, the artist decided to expand upon her pastels with a series of etchings the following year, which were sold by Christie’s in September 2011 for £17,000. Rego’s aim in creating the prints was to disseminate the images and ideas behind them to a broader range of people. It was a technique that worked, and Rego’s Abortion Series has been credited with swaying public opinion in Portugal, which eventually legalised abortion in 2007 after a second referendum.
Untitled (The Abortion Series) Sold by Christie’s in 2011
Shakespeare’s Room
These three lithographs in colours were sold by Phillips in June 2023 for £10,500, exceeding the estimated £5,000 to £7,000. They are a wonderful example of Rego’s vivid imagination and creative use of props; her studio was full of strange objects, life-sized marionettes, and costumes that she would arrange to form the basis of whatever she was working on at the time. The bizarre assortment of items in these images and the unsettling presence of the gun immediately capture the viewer’s attention, while the triptych format allows us to come up with our own narrative to explain the strange events Rego depicts.
Nursery Rhymes Sold by Bonhams in 2013
Pendle Witches
The 12 prints in Paula Rego’s Pendle Witches series were created to accompany a number of poems by Blake Morrison, and they were sold by Veritas in March 2017 for £10,418. The series reflects Rego’s keen interest in narrative, as well as her awareness and confrontation of social injustice, partly honed by her childhood growing up in the Estado Novo dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar.
The 1612 Pendle witch trials are amongst the most well-known in British history. A dozen people from the area of Pendle Hill in Lancashire were arrested and accused of witchcraft. One died in prison, and of the 11 who went to trial, only one was found not guilty and escaped hanging.
Rego’s prints take the injustice at the heart of the Pendle witch trials and turn it into something new. The images are an interesting mixture of the fantastical and the modern, with some showing women in archaic outfits and strange, dreamlike situations, and others depicting women in contemporary outfits and environments. One thing that persists across all the images, though, is an intense sense of isolation as the women confront the world alone.
Pendle Witches Sold by Veritas in 2017
Goat Girl IV
This hand-coloured etching dates from 2012, and it was sold by Christie’s in June 2013 for £9,500. It may be loosely inspired by a Greek fairy tale (which also has many other variants) about a goat born to human parents that could remove its skin to become a beautiful girl. Rego’s print is laced with sinister undertones and unfinished narratives, from the looming shadows on the wall to the three peculiar figures that populate the page, and it’s a masterful example of the artist’s ability to create a sense of unease and tension.
Goat Girl IV Sold by Christie’s in 2012
The Curved Planks
As with the Pendle Witches and the Nursery Rhymes series, this set of six etchings was created to accompany text, this time for the fable called Les Planches Courbes (‘The Curved Planks’) by Yves Bonnefoy. Rego met Bonnefoy in 1977 through her husband, fellow artist, Victor Willing, and the pair had always been extremely interested in collaborating together.
The etchings were sold by Bonhams in September 2021 for £8,000, and they remain one of the finest examples of Rego’s impressive technical skill, vibrant imagination, and deep interest in all kinds of narratives and stories.
The Curved Planks Sold by Christie’s in 2021
