Paula Rego’s House of Stories
“Clothes enclose the body and tighten it and give you a feeling of wholeness. You are contained inside your clothes. So I put them in the pictures”
Paula Rego
Paula Rego is a Portuguese painter, illustrator and printmaker, known all around the world. She was born in 1935 and she lives in Britain since 1951. Living in the Salazar regime before leaving to England gave her inspiration for her work. She expresses polemic themes from our society, themes like abortion, rape, women’s discrimination and so on.
Today you can visit her house in Cascais. The Museum House of Stories (in Portuguese Casa das Histórias) was designed by the Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto de Moura. It’s a modern museum in the middle of a green landscape with the magic of Cascais.
There is a permanent exhibition with more than 500 original paintings and drawings and you can also admire some works from her husband Victor Willing, painter and art commentator.
The museum is located in the middle of the village, right on the Marechal Carmona Park, near by the Cultural Center and the museum of Castro Guimarães Counts. Its entrance is free and after the museum you can visit the souvenir shop with souvenirs as postcards and cups, but also with some books illustrated by Paula Rego as well as painting pencils and notebooks.