The wonderful mixes with the everyday and banality meets the mystery in cradle rhymes — an English genre of absurd verses (nonsense, practically unknown in the rest of Europe and which are now considered written literature. but a kind of common language, like religious prayers, anecdotes, incantations or curses.

At the age of ten, Paula Rego entered the Colégio Inglês where she recited these verses for the first time. Now, with grandchildren, she rediscovered them to execute a series of engravings, which could have been made by a child, spontaneously, drawing directly on the canvas, without any previous study.

He purposely did not distance himself from illustration, as he wanted to recover an artistic category normally considered humble and honor Victorian artists such as John Tenniel, who created Alice, the demonic painter Arthur Rackham, and Beatrix Potter, who also loved animals and defended them - against the gardeners.