Secrets of the cow-skulled scarecrow: did one man's cruel tales inspire Paula Rego's best paintings?

"In the summer of 2004, Paula Rego wrote to Martin McDonagh asking for permission to name some pictures after his play The Pillowman. His shocking investigation into the relationship between art and life featured two brothers under interrogation for the torture and murder of children. One is a writer whose stories are summarised by an investigator as: A hundred and one ways to skewer a fucking five-year-old."

"Rego, then a 69-year-old grandmother as well as a world famous artist, had been taken to see the play at the National Theatre in London by one of her daughters, who knew it would resonate with her. The brutality and beauty and humour rang very true and like something I had known all my life, she wrote to McDonagh. I am actually Portuguese, although I have lived in London for 50 years, and our stories are brusque and cruel like yours."

"The Pillowman is set in a totalitarian state in which people's imagination is ruthlessly policed. When Rego was growing up, Portugal was under the dictatorship of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, who controlled a deeply conservative society for more than three decades with the help of his secret police. Her identification with the play was so strong that she had gone so far as to make her own pillowman, a life-size doll made of cushions stuffed into old tights,"

Paula Rego wrote to Martin McDonagh in 2004 requesting permission to name pictures after his play The Pillowman. The play portrays two brothers interrogated for torturing and murdering children, and features a writer who produces grotesque tales. Rego, a Portuguese-born artist living in London, related the play's brutality, beauty and humour to stories from her upbringing under Antonio de Oliveira Salazar's dictatorship. She made a life-size Pillowman doll from cushions and old tights as a model for the central panel of a triptych destined for Tate Britain. A lively correspondence followed, with McDonagh sending stories and proposing possible future collaboration.

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