The Dance
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Dance (1988) is a painting by Paula Rego.
It is a large painting depicting eight characters dancing in the moonlight on a beach. There are two couples, two women with a child and a single woman, taller than the other characters. In the background is a large cliff. On the right side of the painting is a large cliff topped by a massive building.
Maria Manuel Lisboa has suggested that it resembles a military fort on the Estoril coast in Caxias, used as a prison and place of torture during the Salazar dictatorship.
The painting was completed after the death of Paula Rego's husband, Victor Willing. It seems to feature autobiographical elements, as is often the case with Paula Rego's images. The lone woman is, according to Cécile Debray, Paula Rego herself, alone after the death of her husband. But her husband is one of the men in the painting and is dancing with another woman.
It can also be seen as an allegory of the different ages of a woman's life.
For this painting, Paula Rego posed her son Nicholas and used a photo of her husband as a model for the other male character. The painting was the subject of eleven preparatory ink drawings that Rego donated to the Tate when the painting was acquired in 1989.
