Mouth Organ depicts a woman seated on a chair playing the harmonica. The mustard fabric of her dress jars against the voluminous red curtain suspended behind her, which heightens the theatricality of the scene. Her legs are akimbo, her feet shod with high heel shoes, and the strain of the pose causes her exposed calf muscles to tense. The right foot rests on a block, which is cropped at the bottom left-hand corner. The attitude, legs apart and one leg raised, is redolent of the poses that Rego depicted in her series about pregnancy, childbirth and abortion some five years earlier. The woman’s facial expression is contorted by undefined emotion. Her eyes glance away to the right, her brows are furrowed, and the forward incline of the head casts shadows around the eyes, nose and mouth. The harmonica is cradled in hands with long fingers, and the instrument is the focal point of the composition. Although she is making music, her thoughts appear to be elsewhere, or rather, her tune is fed by deep wells of feeling that remain hidden from view. From 1986, it was often Paula Rego’s practice to compose the subjects of her pictures in the studio and to study them from life, and that arrangement was used in the execution of this work.

Many of the stories told by Rego’s work have yet to be interpreted, and the narrative of Mouth Organ is still opaque. A clue to its meaning is provided by the title of a closely related lithograph called Apres la Fête. It was made in the same year as Mouth Organ and is a mirror image of the work. The yellow of the dress is retained in the lithograph, but the background has been erased and instead there stands behind the chair a pinto calçudo (a baby chick with feathers covering its legs). The image carries a sexual undertone since ‘pinto’ is a Portuguese slang term for male genitalia. In this context, ‘Apres la Fête’ implies a post-coital moment; her sexual partner has departed and the woman is left to her thoughts. ‘La fête’ might be intercourse itself, and another pastel of that title made in 2003 depicts a woman playing the accordion or squeeze box, which musical instrument—owing to its rhythmic extensions and contractions—is a colloquial visual metaphor for sex. Mouth Organ is closely related to a larger pastel of the same year, Playing the Harmonica, in which the woman is depicted in the same attitude. In addition to the red curtain, her surroundings are further populated by two rabbit-headed figures, an open bottle of red wine and a half-full tumbler beside her raised foot. It seems plausible that Rego also invested the playing of a mouth organ with sexual connotations.

Mouth Organ was first exhibited in Rego’s solo exhibition at Marlborough Fine Art, London, in 2003, which was subtitled Jane Eyre and other stories. All twenty works in the exhibition were made with pastel. Several other works besides Mouth Organ depict figures playing musical instruments including a harmonica (no. 10, Playing the Harmonica, 2003), an accordion (no. 11, La Fête, 2003; no. 13, Stage Struck, 2003; no. 17, Squeeze Box, 2003) and a ukelele (no. 12, Olga, 2003; no. 16, Alice, 2003). In most instances, the relationship between Rego’s pictures and Charlotte Brontë’s novel is elusive. Some works in the exhibition, such as Jane (no. 3), Edward (no. 4) and Bertha (no. 19), show that she cast some models in the mould of Brontë’s characters: Jane Eyre; Mr Rochester; and Bertha, the deranged and incarcerated wife of Mr Rochester.

Rego only seldom worked in oil paints and throughout her career she preferred lighter-bodied media such as acrylic paint, gouache and, latterly, pastel. She came to regard pastel as a form of painting and referred to her pastels as ‘paintings’. One of the earliest significant works Rego made with pastel was Dog Woman (1994), a large picture measuring 120 by 160 centimetres. She used pastel consistently for the majority of her work from that year onwards.