Edvard Munch’s formative influence on Paola Rego is revealed in the unearthed painting | Paula Rego

He is the towering modernist artist of the Nordic countries. She is the most influential figurative painter of the Iberian Peninsula. But for decades, no one realized that there was a line of influence between Edvard Munch and Paula Rego.

Now, the discovery of an early painting and previously overlooked letter by the late Rigo has revealed the formative role the Norwegian painter played in shaping the Portuguese artist’s work and career.

When Rigaud died in 2022, at the age of 87, it was not widely known that Munch’s The Scream and the Inheritance paintings had influenced her so deeply, 71 years earlier, when she visited a 1951 exhibition of his work at the Tate Gallery in London.

In a newly discovered letter, 16-year-old Rego – who was attending the finishing school in Kent – recounted a school trip to the Tate Museum for her mother Maria, who was in Portugal. “What impressed me most,” she wrote in late 1951, “was the exhibition held there by the modern Norwegian painter, Edvard Munch.” Monk had died seven years earlier, at the age of 80.

“I don’t know if you are familiar with that famous painting ‘The Scream’ – which is his – and he paints almost everything in that genre; he also has many etchings and drawings. But they are so impressive, so impressive that you cannot imagine them. And above all, there is a painting called ‘The Inheritance,’ which shows a seated woman crying with a skeletal child, all painted green, in her lap.”

About a year later, when families in her native Portugal were suffering from a severe drought, Rigo used a color palette reminiscent of The Scream to paint an open-mouthed pregnant woman holding a skeletal baby and turning her face toward the sun.

Rigo rediscovered the small 65cm x 22cm painting, which she called Drought, in 2015, when she and her son, Nick Welling, were tidying up Rigo’s family home in Portugal.

It was placed in a purse and left stored in her London studio until after her death. Last October, it was discovered by Wheeling and the head of her estate, and it had never been shown to the public.

He showed it to Kari J. Brandtzig, an art historian at the Munch Museum in Norway, who immediately saw a connection with Munch’s The Scream and the Anxiety. “It was very clear in the use of red and yellow, and also in how he painted them, very roughly, as Munch did in his paintings in the 1890s,” Brandtzig said.

The painting will be one of the stars of Dancing Among Thorns, the Nordic region’s first major museum exhibition dedicated to Rigo, which opens at the Munch Museum in Oslo on April 24.

When Brandzig was asked to curate the exhibition 18 months ago, she had no idea that Rego had encountered the work of Munch — who died in 1944 — during her formative years as an artist.

But once she began selecting Rigaud’s paintings for the exhibition, she was struck by the similarities between the composition and themes of Rigaud’s The Dance (1988), Munch’s The Dance of Life (1925), Rigaud’s Time – Past and Present (1990) and Munch’s History (1914).

“There is a kind of dialogue with Munch’s pictures,” Brandtzig said. “It’s as if Rego is having a silent conversation with Munch’s visual world.”

Welling confirmed that his late mother was an admirer of Munch – but no matter how hard Brandtzig looked, “we could find no trace of her having gone to Oslo or any other possible place to see Munch.”

“There was no concrete evidence associated with when and how Rigo experienced Monk’s works,” she said.

She had almost given up researching the relationship when the discovery of drought in October convinced her that her hunch was right. “It was like working as a detective,” she said. “I felt butterflies in my stomach. I was so excited.”

Knowing that the picture had been painted when Rego was a teenager, she decided to refine her research to the 1950s. “It was one of her first paintings and was very visually connected to Munk.”

Willing and Rego’s archivist, Eloisa Rodriguez, agreed to help her comb the artist’s archives for letters from the period, which Rego often wrote in Portuguese. A few weeks later, when the letter recounting Munch’s 1951 exhibition was found among Rigo’s papers, Brandtzig felt as if she had won the lottery. “It was electrifying,” Brandtzig said.

Brandtzig also revealed an oral interview Rigaud conducted with the British Library in 2004, for the National Life Stories Project, in which Rigaud recalled attending a “big show” of Munch in the early 1950s in Paris. “In 1952, at the Pitti Palace, she saw almost the same traveling exhibition with her parents,” Brandtzig said. “This gives you some understanding of how important and connected she felt to Munch, and that she may have insisted on going to the exhibition and looking at many of the same pictures she had seen at the Tate a year earlier.”

Rego said she thought Munch’s paintings were “amazing” and “very emotional”: “I loved the life in them and all these things that were happening seemed to me what I was trying to do, really.”

Brandtzig believes that Munch “became an idol for Rigo, arousing her own feelings and giving her courage and inspiration.”

“Munk became a friend in art that she could look up to and get ideas from,” Brandtzig said. “There is something deep inside her that resonates with Munch’s work, something she wants to express. For both Rigo and Munch, art is a way to find yourself and be yourself.”