"Looking Out" by Paula Rego is a picture with three pedigrees. First of all it's English. You can tell -- especially by the way its unfamiliar pose, and its palpable yellowish flesh, and the fact that it was drawn from life rather than a photograph, call to mind the figures of London's Lucian Freud. Secondly it's Portuguese. For though Rego has lived in London for more than 30 years, she was born in Lisbon, and memories of old Portugal -- its seacoast and its sunlight, its peasantry and poverty -- show up often in her pictures, which are now on exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. The third pedigree of "Looking Out" pulls you back in time to the days when human beings first told each other tales of suffering and marvels at night around the fireside. Rego is 73. Birds grow as big as men, and young women grow rabbits' heads, in the visions she calls forth. Rego is an Iberian magic realist. Her pictures all tell stories. Many come from literature, from Charlotte Bronte or Franz Kafka. The story in "Looking Out," which was drawn in colored oil pastels in 1997, comes from "The Sin of Father Amaro" by the 19th-century Portuguese novelist José Maria Eça de Queirós. -- Paul Richard

"Amelia (she is called) had a passionate affair with a priest (called Amaro) and she became pregnant. [She lived] in the country, where she was isolated. . . . She would sometimes look out the window to see who was passing. . . . And she could only show her top part because she was polluted from the waist down, because she was pregnant. This is what I did: Thick legs, heavy skirt."

There are more than 50 paintings, as well as many prints and drawings, in Paula Rego's retrospective at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1250 New York Ave. NW. Admission is $10. For information call 202-783-5000. Her exhibit, curated by Marco Livingstone for the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, closes May 25.