In 1979, Paula Rego visited an Outsider Art exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, where she saw Henry Darger’s watercolour illustrations to his novel The Realms of the Unreal (1973), whose rebellious protagonists were the Vivian Girls. Seduced by these characters and their adventures, which recalled her own childhood, Rego used them as agents provocateurs – going beyond Darger's story – portraying their emotional inconstancy and contradictory natures, capable of both fighting for their freedom and self-determination, and of acts of astounding malignity against one another. Perhaps this is why Rego humorously portrayed them as ‘windmills’, reflecting how the most innocuous domestic incident can end up in wanton carnage.