When Paula Rego (1935-2022) was commissioned to paint a mural for the dining room of the new Sainsbury Wing at the National Gallery in 1990, it seemed a thoughtless insult. There were precedents, to be sure, from Leonardo’s The Last Supper to Mark Rothko’s mural for the Four Seasons in Manhattan, though Rothko cancelled the contract after dining in the restaurant: “Anybody who will eat that kind of food for those kind of prices will never look at a painting of mine.”
But Rego had allegorised the plight of women as cooks, cleaners, waitresses and all-round aproned slaves for so long she surely deserved better than a costly canteen. And yet here she was, among the cakes and the coffees, with a huge mural in sackcloth brown and the blue and white of the Portuguese tiles her figures sometimes have to wash. Why, half a dozen women in Crivelli’s Garden (1990-91) are actually working with brushes, and only one of them is an artist.
