Paula Rego: Crivelli’s Garden — a pivotal work at London’s National Gallery

When Paula Rego, the first associate artist at London’s National Gallery, was invited to create a work for the museum’s restaurant, she made an analogy between the placement of the picture and her own response, as a woman painter, to the institution’s Old Master collection.

“You approach it as if somebody would approach from the kitchen — you don’t go into the front door, you go in the side door,” she said. “If you went through the front door with fanfares and everything, and the waiters and everybody waiting, you come a cropper. If you go through the kitchen, you’ll find a way in. And that’s what I tried to do with the women saints.”

The “women saints” are the statuesque, ungainly, affecting figures dominating her 10-metre-wide canvas “Crivelli’s Garden” (1990-91). At its centre, in a lustrous creamy billowing frock, St Martha wields her broom but shuts her eyes to the busy lives going on around her: a vision of deep interiority and solitude, recalling the large, awkward woman whirling alone in Rego’s important painting “The Dance” (1988), painted soon after the death of her husband.

Behind Martha, St Judith slips a skull-shaped mass into an open bag as laconically as if she were snagging some shopping rather than Holofernes’s head. Below, sitting on a step, is one version of Mary Magdalene, in a black opera dress, lost in contemplation. Another, in a sleek trouser suit, perches at a window ledge with an upward, sensual gaze; angels flutter suggestively between her legs, pushing her up to heaven.

Christianity — whose patriarchal narrative underpins much of the National Gallery collection — enters Regoland quite wonderfully via the kitchen. Yet with its beautiful maze of columns, loggias, archways, staircases and the pellucid Portuguese setting of blue-and-white tiles painted with yet more stories and allusions to the National Gallery collection, “Crivelli’s Garden” is also a magnificent decorative piece.

At once grand and engrossing in its spatial games and complexities, for decades it was the perfect backcloth to the Sainsbury Wing Dining Room. Now the building has closed for reconstruction, and Rego’s luminous, teeming, monumental picture is out of the domestic arena and hangs centrally in the National Gallery opposite its inspiration, Carlo Crivelli’s “Madonna of the Swallow” (c1491).

The restoration of Crivelli’s altarpiece in 1989, just before Rego arrived at the National, drew attention to its gleaming ornamental predella, framed in bands of pink, green and maroon to imitate precious stones. It contains five separate panels, each relating a biblical story, set in a landscape seen from different angles and opening finally to a translucent blue sky. Rego took the format of five linked, distinct spaces to create a framework for her own layers of story upon story, repositioned here to the coastal Ericeira of her childhood, its sea and skies glimpsed in sumptuous receding vistas.

It’s a free exhibition and a marvellous moment, this juxtaposition of two supreme narrative paintings: celebrating art’s continuities, dialogues and reinventions, and Rego’s triumphant vision of female experience taking its place in the mainstream.

Her extensive preparatory drawings and watercolour studies are shown alongside; you note the precision and sharp definition of the draughtsmanship, and how imagination takes flight in the glassy painted sketches where she experiments with relationships between the figures, their scale, their costumes, their placement, moving them around and clothing them like puppets, and devising extravagant stagings.

A tremendous baroque fountain, topped by Europa riding a bull, comes inkily into being. A figure anticipating Rego’s “Dog Woman”, a nude crouching on all fours, pours down a wall. These sketches are more brutal than the finished painting, where devils turn to angels, and white doves populate a space originally guarded by a black hawk. 

The drawings, however, done from life, are tender. Several models were National Gallery members of staff, who kept their everyday aspect and identities even as they were transformed into figures from history and legend — a living tableau, energetic and immediate. 

Crivelli’s opening scene on the left features St Catherine as an erudite, elegant princess, intently staring ahead to the subsequent panels. Rego reversed the order and began on the right, echoing Catherine with the figure of an eager young girl leaning towards the other pictures, and holding a book. Rego called her the painting’s “anchor”, emblem of knowledge passed between generations of women. 

The model was a junior member of the education department, Ailsa Bhattacharya, who reappears in the next scene, hugely enlarged as a matronly St Elizabeth. She grabs her teenage cousin the Virgin by the arm and shields her mouth with her hand as they whisper about their pregnancies. 

The biblical Visitation is animated by contemporary gestures and expressions, and is suspended in time. The images surrounding it include Mary and the infant Jesus, portrayed on a wall, and Elizabeth’s son John the Baptist as a child. “My paintings are stories, but everything happens in the present, incidents, daydreams, passions and consequences”, Rego explained.

In the distance, a frieze shows St Margaret erupting from the belly of a dragon, to become patron saint of childbirth. In front of this mural — in one of many dazzling double levels of representation — another Margaret steps out boldly, leading by the leash a wildly out of proportion toad.

Meanwhile, in one further picture-within-a-picture, Bhattacharya takes a third role as a little girl drawing a snake. Her teacher, in a joyful, warm portrait, is based on Erika Langmuir, then head of the gallery’s education department — depicted symbolically transferring learning to her younger colleague. Langmuir was celebrated for her belief in the power of pictures in everyday life, and for communicating that to wide audiences. 

You can read the whole painting as a series of powerful exchanges, held within the overarching conversation between Rego and Crivelli, and more broadly with what she called the museum’s “masculine collection”. Crivelli’s “Annunciation” (room 15), a Renaissance cityscape where the Angel Gabriel is interrupted on the street outside a detailed cross-section of Mary’s house, was also key for Rego’s perspectival shifts and spaces unfolding into other spaces. Further references to paintings in the National Gallery abound — from Uccello’s “Saint George and the Dragon” to Titian’s “Diana and Actaeon”.

What is transforming is that the old stories are now told from women’s perspectives, and that the narrative impulse itself is brought into contemporary art. If we take both these approaches for granted today, it is predominantly because Rego pioneered them in the early 1990s. Delving into the creation of “Crivelli’s Garden”, this exhibition pinpoints a pivotal work in British art history and, a year after her death, raises our sense of Rego’s originality and impact higher than ever.

20 July to 29 October, nationalgallery.org.uk