Contemporary response to Carlo Crivelli’s The Madonna of the Swallow shown alongside original
When Paula Rego was asked to paint a mural for the dining room of the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing in 1990, it “seemed a thoughtless insult”, said Laura Cumming in The Observer. The artist, who died last year aged 87, was renowned for focusing on the kinds of people normally ignored in art. Her work addressed “the plight of women as cooks, cleaners, waitresses and all-round aproned slaves”; surely she “deserved better” than an upmarket canteen.
