She started painting in her fifties. She's 91 now.

Rose Wylie: The Picture Comes First opened at the Royal Academy on 24 February. Over 90 works, the biggest show of her career. She now lives in Kent, paints every day and puts newspaper under her feet so paint doesn't ruin her shoes.

She grew up in London during the Blitz. Remembers the bombing raids not with fear but with curiosity: her house took a direct hit. That became paintings — a recurring motif of the German V-1 flying bomb over London, personal history through the shape of a weapon.

Then Elizabeth I, Nicole Kidman, Serena Williams, Marilyn Monroe, Snow White. "I don't paint kings and queens because of their status, but because I like their outfits." Frames from Kill Bill settle in memory for decades and resurface on canvas. Not as quotation but as how memory actually works with fragments, angles, details that weren't supposed to stick.

Canvases unprimed, unstretched. Paint applied by hand. The final room: four monochrome paintings of animals made with fingers. The form reads, but that's almost beside the point.

Loewe, Juergen Teller, David Zwirner. The world found her late. She didn't seem to mind!

Royal Academy, until 19 April 2026.