Paula Rego

Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., London

Private Collection, New York

Ivor Braka, London

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1999

London, Serpentine Gallery, Paula Rego, 1988, p. 52, no. 46, illustrated in colour

Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia; and Washington, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Paula Rego, 2007, pp. 79 and 255, illustrated in colour

John McEwen, Paula Rego, London 2002, p. 162, no. 160, illustrated in colour

Fiona Bradley, Paula Rego, London 2002, p. 38, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the blue of the sky is lighter and the red of the girl's coat is deeper and richer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. The sheet is laid down on canvas. There are a few artist's pinholes intermittently along the edges and one to the centre of the composition. Close inspection reveals a few fly spots in places. There are a few unobtrusive handling creases to the sheet which look to be original and inherent to the artist's working process. There is a small media accretion to the right edge, approximately 45cm up from the bottom right corner. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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The Cadet and his Sister is a psychologically charged work by the impassioned painter of ‘stories’ Paula Rego. Executed in 1988 the work dates from a seminal turning point in the artist’s idiosyncratic practice. Catapulted onto the international art scene that same year, Paula Rego was taken on by Marlborough Fine Art, London and honoured with a major retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery, London. Concurrently this was the year that Rego’s beloved husband, the revered British artist Victor Willing, passed away. As a cathartic distraction against the emotional darkness of this personal tragedy Rego painted some of the most ambitious works of her career, including, The Departure (1988), The Maids (1988) and The Cadet and his Sister. Moving away from the flat, graphic surfaces of her earlier depictions, the artist introduced shadow and volume into these large-scale figurative paintings. Imbuing her work with a heightened sense of reality, Rego depicted subjects inspired by real people. Herein, the male figure in both the present work and Departure is based on Ron Mueck, Rego’s son-in-law. Invested with intense personal sentiment The Cadet and his Sister is a deeply human and poignant painting that deals with the painful subject of a sad farewell.

In a scene of an impending departure, a young cadet is preparing to leave for his military service. His sister has knelt down beside him to tie his shoelaces. Her handbag and gloves are placed at her side, whilst a small cockerel flanks the young boy. With an azure blue sky that recalls the Portuguese Azulejo tiles, the composition is bathed in the warm light of the Mediterranean. Stark architectural linearity, long shadows and an empty tree-lined avenue conjure the surrealist scenes of Giorgio de Chirico. On first glance the work tells the tale of a caring relationship between two siblings. However, permeated with allegorical references and symbolism it is a multi-layered narrative, where nothing is as straightforward as it seems.

The underlying symbolic complexities of the work are most pertinently outlined by the artist herself: "I wanted the young man to be slightly younger than his sister, possibly thirteen and she’d be like fifteen, and she’s more knowing than he is and he’s depending on her quite a lot... I very much wanted that avenue going up and disappearing into the distance, a bit like a theatrical backdrop. And the sky is meant to be like a sky from my catechism book. And then the props were very important. Her bag had to be brown like that, and lined in red. I mean it had to be dangerous, as if it could snap shut. Both it and the gloves are like – I suppose it’s pretty obvious – but like sex symbols. But opposites. And the cockerel is small and puffed up, and a pretend one, a porcelain one; so it shows he’s impotent, the poor cadet. And it’s a lesson you see – a lesson for us and also a lesson between the two of them. It’s about accepting fate; accepting the way things are; in a nice sort of way. It’s not an unhappy picture at all” (Paula Rego quoted in: John McEwen, Paula Rego, London 1992, p. 166). Two years later Rego elaborated upon this with a somewhat unnerving explanation: “It’s about incest. They have just made love. She dresses him. He is going away to do his military service. The cock is his masculinity. The handbag is her femininity. It’s a container but it snaps shut. It could castrate him. The gloves have various connotations – a surgeon, a gardener, a butcher. The walls are abrupt and the avenue seems false, like a backdrop. Or if it is real it is a dead-end – incest leads nowhere. His future is destroyed. She will control him forever” (Paula Rego quoted in: ibid., p. 167).

An ambiguous tale of control and domination, love and loss that offers some of Rego's unique repertoire of black humour and emotive potency, The Cadet and his Sister is a pertinent work by this venerated chronicler of human drama. As a candid storyteller, Rego has never been afraid to upend traditions and explore disquieting facets of human nature with a unique emotional honesty and frankness. Through a pertinent use of metaphor and association her works evoke voluminous emotions and narratives and have been widely recognised as incisive portraits of human existence.