Ines de Castro
In 2014 Paula Rego offered to create a work for the Women’s Art Collection to mark the College’s 60th Anniversary. Members of the college community were asked to choose a subject and, taking inspiration from the history and folktales of Rego’s native Portugal, chose Inês de Castro. Inês was a 14th-century Galician noblewoman, who had an illegitimate affair with Prince Pedro of Portugal and was brutally murdered by his father, King Alfonso IV. Allegedly, when he ascended to the throne Pedro exhumed Inês’ corpse and gave his deceased lover a lavish coronation.
The painting was created as a response to Maggi Hambling’s Gulf Women Prepare for War (1986). Aside from their common themes of violence, nationalism and gender, there are echoes between the paintings’ colour schemes and compositions: in both works the pale, dusky pinks are contrasted with dark greens and browns and the female soldier’s gun which cuts diagonally across Hambling’s painting finds a match in Inês’ recumbent pose.
