The Dance is quite a heart-breaking picture I think, it's a very personal work because she painted it over the course of six months and her husband died before the completion of the painting.
On the left, you have Paula Rego, so a self-portrait of the artists and then she's also represented on the right side of the painting dancing with her husband, Victor who has just died.
And then Victor is depicted a second time this time in the middle, dancing with a blond woman and I think that's really a heart-breaking, you know, sight I mean, the husband just died and it's a really beautiful tribute to have him in the painting and not only once, but twice.
What's really interesting for our work is to know her process and how she paints, how she is in the studio.
For example, for The Dance when we looked at it, there were just lots of holes over the surface and they're not painted in.
When I looked into the paper records and looked at interviews that she had given to the newspapers I found out that she liked to work on the floor, on the walls.
And so she would pin the papers to the wall and then paint. That would explain why these holes are there and visible. And so we would not fill them and retouch them because they're part of the process of how, you know, she painted it. They're a mark of the making of this painting
She decided to make The Dance about growing up as a girl and her life with Vic and because Vic was in bed unfortunately, he couldn't model for the picture. She asked me and at the time I looked very much like Vic.
She got one of the suits and his shoes, I put it on and I started modelling and then Vic died that summer in June. June the fifth, he died.
The grief was so palpable, I could see that she was distraught and the only way she could deal with it was the way she's always dealt with everything, which is to fling herself into her work.
She said, “Come on, we've got to carry on with the picture now.” For me, it was one of the toughest summers of my life really, modelling for that picture.
At the end of it, for my birthday, she gave me a drawing she did, of me posing as Vic. And I still have it on my wall and every time I look at it, it looks exactly like me, but I only see my father.
At the end of that picture, she draws this giant woman alone in Portuguese folk dress and that's my mother, on her own, defiant, independent and able to face the world, now that Vic is gone.
I hope that her legacy is that other women will have the courage and the interest to explore their own passions because I think that, what has happened is that she's managed to open the door for lots of other women to follow.
