Entitled “Uncanny Visions: Paula Rego and Francisco de Goya”, the exhibition will be on display until 5 January 2025 at the museum located in Bath.

According to the museum's website, this will be the first exhibition to showcase Goya's "Los disparates" (1815-1823) and Paula Rego's "Nursery Rhymes" series (1989) in their entirety.

The exhibition also includes a selection of Paula Rego's three-dimensional objects - sculptures and studio props - and, "for the first time, a selection of Goya prints that the artist owned and hung around her bed, these being the first and last images she looked at every day".

When contacted by Lusa agency about the number of Paula Rego's works in the exhibition and their respective provenance, the museum responded by email that it will feature a total of 77 works, 42 by the Portuguese painter.

All the loans come from public and private collections in the United Kingdom, including the family collection of Paula Rego, who left Portugal for London at the age of 17 to study at the Slade School of Fine Art, where she met her future husband, the English artist Victor Willing.

“Both Goya and Rego have long been associated with the concept of strangeness. The themes and images present in the work of both are rooted in popular and folkloric elements and resort to a feeling of disconcerting and unsettling familiarity, whether through the absurdity of social rules – captured by Goya – or the cruelty of childhood verses, noted by Rego”, states a text about the exhibition sent to Lusa by the Holburne Museum.

Paula Rego’s “Nursery Rhymes” are a series of more than 30 prints and etchings produced in 1989 that will be on display with five additional prints made in 1994 to accompany an illustrated publication published by Thames & Hudson.

The exhibition explores how two artists – who lived a century apart – used similar visual motifs and narrative devices to convey a universal range of human emotions.

The exhibition route was created to “examine how Goya’s influence on Rego, acknowledged by the artist herself, is visible through the media and techniques she used, as well as through some of her themes and aesthetics”.

“Visitors to this exhibition will be able to observe how Rego’s unique visual translation of traditional nursery rhymes, taught to young children, presents a degree of irony and a sinister touch that is close to Goya’s spirit”, the museum’s text also highlights.

In addition to the strange, the exhibition explores notions common to both artists, such as the absurd and satire, folklore, humor, violence, sensuality, deception, the supernatural, anthropomorphism and animalisation.