Rego's ‘Jack and Jill’ is a typical blend of the perverse and the sinister. The rhyme is as clear as water. The one thing we surely do not visualize is a clifftop by the sea with a flock of gulls in attendance. Rego's image is just about plausible. The children could have been playing at the foot of the cliff, and there are habitations at the top, so they might have taken an empty bucket up there.
Etching with aquatint, on Velin Arches wove
Signed and inscribed ‘A/P’
One of fourteen artist’s proofs aside from the numbered edition of 75
From Nursery Rhymes
Printed by Culford Press, London
Co-published by the artist and Marlborough Graphics, London
Plate: 32.3 × 21.5 cm (12.7 × 8.4 in)
Sheet: 52 × 38 cm (20.5 × 14.9 in)
Rosenthal 37
In excellent condition
Within a handmade oak frame with UV filtered glass Frame: 61.7 x 46 cm (24.3 x 18.1 in)
There is an anthropological view that the climb is an allusion to some mystical, or at least quasi-mystical ceremony in that no one in folklore would climb a hill for water unless, like dew-water, the water had some special significance. Jack and Jill being typical Rego children, anything is possible. Jill tumbling is in dramatic free-fall, her skirts floating up, her hair standing up in the rush of wind. Jack is touching his obviously rapidly mending head. Yet the sense of headlong motion and danger is infinitely stronger in Rego's realization than in the essentially cheerful rhyme, and you do wonder, without being too literal about it, just how the children did scramble up that sheer cliff, carrying that very large and heavy iron pail. Jill would look fine as an illustration in Arthur Ransome, but Jack is portrayed with all the pathos of a brave little Victorian orphan, with his more formal clothes and his almost demure looking face turned downwards. The play of light and dark is heavily contrasted. Jack's clothes dark against Jill's light ones; the dark sea against the pale sky; Jill's ogreish shadow against the lighter cliff and matching the land at the top. The contrast between Jack's highly complex immobility and Jill's rushing down is beautifully conveyed. Add to this the inescapable association with Alice's fall down the rabbit hole, particularly in Tenniel's rendering, and Rego's images are richly multi-faceted for such an ostensibly simple rhyme. The artist has pointed out that this print is partly based on one by Winslow Homer.
— T. G. Rosenthal, Paula Rego: The Complete Graphic Work (London: Thames & Hudson, 2012), 28.
