Paula Rego frequently used an illustrator’s techniques to represent invented, fantastic stories. Her images are akin to fairy tales and often bear the same imprimatur of veiled threat and morbidity. Girl Exposing her Throat to a Dog depicts a girl interacting with a dog: the animal stands on hindlegs, apparently ready—his jaws open—to bite into her neck, which she offers willingly. Her left hand holds one of the dog’s paws; the other, invitingly held on the dog’s shoulder, seems to pull the animal to her. She is bending at the knees to make it easier for the dog to reach her. The viewer witnesses the scene through the eyes of the two figures, a woman and a young girl, who stand to the side watching. It seems as if the human-animal drama is staged for their benefit. This work was made with pen and ink before being tinted with tonal washes of watercolour. The colour choice, a hue of pale red, is faintly sinister and resonates with the threatening imagery of the drawing.

Dogs have a special significance in Rego’s career. She made an anthropomorphic image of a ‘dog woman’ when she was a student at the Slade School of Fine Art in the early fifties—a feral yet human creature, standing on knees and elbows, with a snarling mouth—and later reprised the theme in the nineties. Several times in her career Rego had recourse to a figure type contorted by emotions of unspeakable fury and rage. The image of a dog was the archetype of a savage, uninhibited being, and as such it recurred in her work. She created with it an iconography, which translated powerful emotions not easily translated into words. Referring to her ‘Dog Women’ paintings of the mid-nineties, Rego explained to Juliet Rix in 2019:

They were about an emotional connection. An emotional dependency and love. And the physical sensation of loss and missing. The physical connection, too. The animal quality of that longing.

Girl Exposing her Throat to a Dog relates to Rego’s ‘Girl and Dog’ series, which was made in the three years preceding the demise of the artist’s husband Victor Willing in 1988. He suffered with multiple sclerosis, and Rego’s experiences of nursing him were mapped into imagery of a dog cared for by a young girl (sometimes two). Girl Exposing her Throat to a Dog speaks to the self-effacing, self-denying, even self-immolating role of a nurse caring for those who are chronically, terminally sick.

This work was shown in an exhibition of ‘works on paper by contemporary artists’ at Marlborough Fine Art, London, in 1988. Seven works by Rego were included, Girl Exposing her Throat to a Dog among them, and some of the others also explored the girl/dog theme of this work:

51. The Mother-in-Law (1987)
52. The Mother-in-law (1987)
53. The Maids (1987)
54. The Maids (1987)
55. A Girl, her Mother and a Dog (1985)
56. Two Girls and a Dog (1987)