Dora Carrington: Beyond Bloomsbury

For the first time, the “unpindownable” Carrington is defined in terms of her own person and her art, not her male lovers

Dora Carrington, Farm at Watendlath, 1921 (detail). Oil on canvas. Presented by Noel Carrington, the artist’s brother, 1987. Photo: Tate.

Pallant House Gallery, Chichester
9 November 2024 – 27 April 2025

by ANNA McNAY

The name Carrington is synonymous with that of Lytton Strachey, author of Eminent Victorians and one of the original “Bloomsberries”, and, until recently, I confess to her iconic (and I don’t use that word lightly) portrait of him being the only one of her paintings with which I was familiar. I would hazard a guess that this might be true for a good few others, as well – even those who, like me, would consider themselves to know a fair bit about the Bloomsbury Group and its art. Too young to have seen the exhibition of her work at the Barbican in 1995, I do, however, know and love the biopic, starring Emma Thompson, which came out that same year. But, in that, as elsewhere, Carrington is defined in relation to Strachey, not as a woman and an artist in her own right. Thankfully, this new exhibition at Pallant House Gallery, curated by Ariane Bankes and Anne Chisholm (who recently edited a new edition of Carrington’s letters), takes huge strides in setting this record straight.

Born Dora de Houghton Carrington in Hereford in 1893, Carrington dropped her first name when she began at the Slade in 1910.¹ She also, along with her friends, cut her hair into a short bob, becoming one of the first “cropheads”, as Virginia Woolf called them. Bankes describes Carrington as “a natural rebel from the start”. The fourth of five children, she grew up in Bedford with a much-beloved father and a rather-too-conventional mother. While the only maternal portrait in the exhibition is an almost featureless pencil sketch, drawn from the side, while the subject sleeps, the sketch of her father, with his pipe, from 1912, is accompanied by a full-length painting of him, clad in coat and hat, with a droopy moustache, sitting beneath a bright red blanket, with his newspaper, in an armchair. It is imbued with tenderness and love.

Lady Ottoline Morrell, Dora Carrington, vintage snapshot print, 1917. National Portrait Gallery London. Purchased with help from the Friends of the National Libraries and the Dame Helen Gardner Bequest, 2003. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

Although attending a school that specialised in art and taking private drawing lessons on the side, Carrington truly began to blossom when she arrived at the Slade. She was tutored by Henry Tonks, whose influence can be seen in her beautiful drawing of her brother, Noel Carrington (c1912), where shadow, light and depth are created through line alone. Sadly, Carrington tore up many of her drawings from this period, something Sarah MacDougall, director of scholarship at the Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, describes in her essay in the exhibition’s accompanying catalogue as “a rite of passage among Slade students, who were encouraged to ‘weed out’ their inferior work”.² Carrington made quick progress, however, and her work was soon singled out for “elements of vision … ‘beyond’ academic requirement”.³ Female Figure Lying on her Back (c1912), a reclining nude against a dark background, is traditional and academic in style. Chisholm describes it thus: “The muscles of the twisted and foreshortened right arm are beautifully rendered, and the generally brown palette only goes up a notch in the rouge of the model’s cheeks and the ginger of her pubic hair.”⁴ For this, Carrington was awarded second prize for figure painting at the end of her first year. She also won the Melville Nettleship Prize for Figure Composition and was awarded the Slade Scholarship, worth £35 per annum. A year later, she shared first prize for figure painting for her Female Figure Standing (1913), shown from behind and painted in the same manner.⁵

Dora Carrington, Female Figure Standing, 1913, Oil on canvas, UCL Art Museum, Image courtesy of UCL Culture.

In her biography of Carrington, Gretchen Gerzina describes this painting as “show[ing] a luminescence and a solidity not yet apparent in her winning work of the year before … Its dark backdrop allows it to reflect light and put the model into shining relief. Even the pose suggests confidence, for although her face is turned away and her head bent forward, the woman’s hands are firmly on her hips and her hair intricately pinned up.”⁶ It is true that there is something solid and self-assured about the figure. Art historian Jane Hill, who curated the Barbican exhibition, also remarks on this display of confidence: “Carrington’s treatment of the woman’s strongly lit figure using pearlescent, oystershell colours for the body tones, and blue highlights for the crevices and hollows of her back and buttocks, showed her confident and skilful use of colour.” She continues: “… and [the painting] provoked Gertler’s admiration: ‘I loved that nude painting of yours. What a good painter you are!’”.⁷

Centre: Mark Gertler, The Servant Girl, 1923. Installation view, Dora Carrington: Beyond Bloomsbury, 9 November 2024–27 April 2025, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester. Image courtesy Pallant House Gallery. Photo: Barney Hindle.

Mark Gertler was to play a significant role in Carrington’s life as her (unfulfilled, since she long refused to lose her virginity to him) lover, but also fellow artist and critic. Accordingly, the curators have included a number of works by him to offer the opportunity for comparison of the formal elements of each painter’s work and to add colour to their story. For example, Gilbert Cannan and His Mill (1916) depicts a place in the Chilterns where Gertler and Carrington used to meet. It is a fabulously geometric composition, showing Cannan with his two huge but soppy-looking dogs: a Newfoundland called Luath and a black-and-white St Bernard called Porthos, the latter previously owned by JM Barrie and said to be the inspiration for Nana in Peter Pan. With its bold oranges, greens and blues, and sharp angles, the painting nods to Gertler’s famous “large and very unsaleable picture”⁸ of the same year, Merry-Go-Round, both showing the influence of vorticism. Gertler’s later picture, The Servant Girl (1923), hangs alongside two portraits by Carrington of Annie Stiles (1921 and 1925), the maid at Tidmarsh, where she had set up home with Strachey. Carrington became close to Stiles, seeing her almost as extended family, and took her to fairs and on her first visit to London. Although Gertler’s subject is not Annie, all three paintings share formal similarities and show the influence of Renoir in their impressionistic brushstrokes. The eyes in Carrington’s portraits are quite stylised and almond shaped. In a letter to Strachey in 1921, Carrington wrote: “I am so excited about my picture of Annie. If only I can carry out my intentions it ought to be a very lovely picture. But I find my hand is such a rebel at obeying the head’s orders.”⁹

Despite her early success, Carrington’s output, in terms of paintings, was not large, and it is difficult today to see much of it except in reproduction. Just 16 of her works in public collections feature on Art UK, and, of those, three are only attributions. The majority of her output is in private hands, often abroad, and some works still remain untraced.¹⁰ As much, if not more, can be gleaned about Carrington from her writing, with more than 2,000 surviving letters from between 1911 and 1932. “She was a real tease,” says Bankes. “Her letters are so full of humour, so full of life and vitality.” And, in her introduction to the catalogue, Ali Smith notes of Carrington’s letters “their swanky cantering charm and their lovely and lively unruliness”.¹¹ Nevertheless, as art historian Mary Ann Caws adds, in her study of Carrington, alongside Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell: “The funny informal brightness of her letter-writing art is matched, at other moments, by her extremes of ‘melancholly’, as she always spelled it, and by her nightmares and dreads, coupled with sharp feelings of guilt towards anyone she was ever involved with.”¹²

Further to her letters, Carrington kept two journals. Both volumes were initially in the possession of Frances Partridge (née Marshall, who married Ralph Partridge, Carrington’s husband, after Carrington’s death, more of which later). The second volume, dating from 1928 until Carrington’s death in 1932, and entitled DC Partride [sic] Her Book, is now in the British Library, but the first, from the early 1920s, is missing without trace. Thankfully, some excerpts were included in David Garnett’s edition of Carrington’s letters.¹³ In her own memoir, Frances Partridge offers an insightful portrait of Carrington:

“Her unique personal flavour makes her extraordinarily difficult to describe, but fortunately she has painted her own portrait much better than anyone else could in her letters and diaries, which no one can read without recognising her originality, fantastic imagination and humour. Her poetic response to nature shines from her paintings, and from her letters whose handwriting was in itself a form of drawing … Physically, her most remarkable features were her large, deep-set blue eyes and her mop of thick straight hair, the colour of ripe corn. Her movements were sometimes almost awkward, like those of a little girl, and she would stand with head hanging and toes turned in; while her very soft voice was also somewhat childish and made a first impression of affectation. Her laugh was delightfully infectious.”¹⁴

As well as in her letters, Carrington documented visits to and from friends, trips, parties and her latest paintings in photographs, with which she filled several albums “using readymade books with soft, green covers the colour of old files, and thin, brown leaves like the unrolled tobacco of cigars”. One dating from her time at the Slade recently went up for auction, and we are lucky enough to be able to see this, open to a lively spread, in a vitrine in the exhibition.¹⁵ We are also spoiled by some fabulous film footage of Carrington and friends having fun in a river and climbing trees, and Carrington on her white horse, Belle. This is thought to be the only extant footage of Strachey.

Dora Carrington, Lytton Strachey Reading, 1916. Oil on panel. © National Portrait Gallery, London. Bequeathed by Frances Catherine Partridge (née Marshall), 2004. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

Carrington’s relationship with Strachey is well documented. They met in 1917 at the Woolfs’ home, Asheham House in Sussex, with Strachey being attracted to Carrington’s boyish appearance. Despite their mismatched sexualities (although some might say it was this mismatch that made their relationship work) and his being 17 years her senior, Carrington and Strachey set up home together and remained living (more or less) happily (first at Tidmarsh and later at Ham Spray House) until Strachey’s death in 1932. Carrington met Partridge, an Oxford friend of her brother Noel, in 1918. Partridge fell unrequitedly in love with Carrington, whose devotion was only ever for Strachey, but Strachey, in turn, fell in love with Partridge. In 1921, Carrington agreed to marry Partridge, not for love, but to prevent him leaving what she termed their “triangular trinity of happiness”. All three of them continued to have affairs, and when Partridge fell in love with Frances, she, too, was welcomed into the fold. A further note in Frances’ memoirs reads: “As for Carrington, the view of her as a wildly promiscuous femme fatale is, I am sure, quite incorrect. Her love for Lytton was the focus of her adult life, but she was by no means indifferent to the charms of young men, or of young women either for that matter; she was full of life and loved fun, but nothing must interfere with her all-important relation to Lytton.”¹⁶

Carrington’s painting of their first home, The Mill at Tidmarsh (1918), is sadly only included in the exhibition as a reproduction. As Gerzina writes: “[The painting demonstrates] a use of colour, form and imagination not seen in her earlier works. Like most of her other paintings, it was done in oil. Full of painstaking details which mark her style, this picture uses swathes of orange for the entire roof of the house and its reflection in the water. The River Pang flows under the house through a black tunnel which is the focal point of the painting, and the sky is painted in swatches of blue against a pale background. Noel [Carrington] called the figures of two exotic black swans in the foreground ‘an imaginative introduction’, but it seems no frivolity; instead, it appears deliberate and symbolic.”¹⁷ Frequently, these dark, imagined birds have been interpreted as representing Carrington and Strachey and their unconventional love.

Carrington was not a self-promoter, and she exhibited only rarely. When her work was seen, however, it continued to be admired. For example, when Strachey’s sister, Dorothy, married the prominent French painter Simon Bussy, and they visited Tidmarsh in Carrington’s absence, Bussy was apparently quite overwhelmed by her talent. As Strachey wrote to Carrington: “He was … enthusiastic is not the word. – Looked & gazed, talked, praised, extolled – on & on he went. ‘Better than anything at the London Group’ – but that was by no means all. ‘Better than most French things – better than Marchand “et tous ces gens” – much’! … There was no doubt about the genuineness of it all.”¹⁸

Dora Carrington, Ralph Partridge, 1919. Pencil on paper. Installation view, Dora Carrington: Beyond Bloomsbury, 9 November 2024–27 April 2025, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester. Image courtesy Pallant House Gallery. Photo: Barney Hindle.

The biographer Jan Marsh claims that Carrington “had a wayward streak that made her always upset any emotional equilibrium,”¹⁹ but surely, I would argue, Carrington was the one habitually working to maintain the equilibrium. Her letter to Strachey on the eve of her marriage to Partridge shows the depth of her devotion and just how far she is prepared to go to be with him: “So now I shall never tell you I do care again. It goes after today somewhere deep down inside me, and I’ll not resurrect it to hurt either you or Ralph. Never again. He knows I’m not in love with him … I cried last night to think of a savage cynical fate which has made it impossible for my love ever to be used by you. You never knew, or never will know the very big and devastating love I had for you.”²⁰ Even her beautiful and sensuous drawing of Partridge seen from behind and standing nude as he towel-dries his hair (c1919) is thought to have been made as a gift for Strachey. Carrington did, however, confess: “I got rather a flux over his thighs, & legs. So much that I didn’t do very good drawings.”²¹

Dora Carrington, Iris Tree on a Horse, c1920s. Oil, ink, silver foil and mixed media on glass. The Ingram Collection. Courtesy The Ingram Collection.

It is not true that Carrington gave up painting to be a housewife, but Caws suggests that: “The time taken up by the constant entertaining and performance of amateur plays, films, and trips to London when she could afford them, to say nothing of the almost constant emotional involvement with men and also women, as if in some compensatory mode for her deep and abiding love for Lytton, was for ever inimical to her dedication to her art.”²² This may well have been by design, however, for Carrington admitted in a letter in 1931 that: “I used every excuse not to do any proper painting. It’s partly I have such high standards that I can’t bear to go on with pictures when I can see they are amateurish and dull,”²³ and, three years earlier: “It’s rather maddening to have the ambition of Tintoretto and to paint like a mouse.”²⁴ A recollection of Ham Spray, by Carrington’s friend Iris Tree, certainly paints a scene of blissful domesticity: “Books, paintings, the sweep of the Downs through the windows, an ancient gibbet on high hilltops, the garden overlooked by a weeping ilex tree, roses outside and in … And Carrington, rose-cheeked, pouring tea, laughing upwards from under her thatch of hair, licking her lips with a delicate greediness for delicious things and topics. Lytton wrapped in a shawl, purring with delicate malice … his hands stretched out transparent to the flames in the firelight.”²⁵

As already noted, the curators were keen to put right the skewed story of Carrington’s affairs to include some of her female lovers. One significant such escapade was with the wealthy American journalist and socialite Henrietta Bingham, who, Carrington wrote, had the face of a Giotto Madonna, the voice of a blues singer, and made such wonderful cocktails that she “almost made love to her in public”. “I dream of her six times a week, dreams that even my intelligence is appalled by,” she wrote in a further letter, and, in another: “Really, I had more ecstasy with her and no shame afterwards. Probably if one was completely Sapphic it would be much easier.”²⁶ In the exhibition, there is a wall dedicated to Carrington’s female friends and lovers, with variations on the composition of her first prize-winning nude, only much more freely painted, with imperfect proportions, much more expression and open eroticism.

Dora Carrington, Cat and nude, illustrated letter to Poppet John, 1928, Dora Carrington Collection, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

Another of her female crushes was Julia Strachey (Lytton’s niece), with whom Carrington developed a deep friendship in her later years. Her letters often ended with expressions of physical as well as emotional love, for example: “Julia, I wish I was a young man and not a hybrid monster, so that I could please you a little in some way, with my affection. You know you move me strangely. I remember for some reason everything you say and do, you charm me so much.”²⁷ One of the more erotic sketches shows Julia nude, on a chaise longue, with strings of pearls around her neck and a perfectly painted pout (1925). Another pen-and-pencil sketch, Woman with Cat (c1924), makes the almost certainly intentional joke of the subject having a pussy curled up on her pussy. A nearby vitrine contains a letter, as always illustrated, from Carrington to the teenage daughters of friend and fellow Slade alumnus Augustus John, flirtatious and with a similar feline vignette.

Dora Carrington, Farm at Watendlath, 1921. Oil on canvas. Presented by Noel Carrington, the artist’s brother, 1987. Photo: Tate.

This room also contains a number of landscapes, drawn and painted from Carrington’s travels. A particular favourite of mine is Children and Women on a Beach (c1928), in which you can still see her pencil outlines, and which gives a real sense of a cold, wet, windy, typically English day at the seaside, with an ominously grey sky overhead. Farm at Watendlath (1921) was made in Cumbria, the summer after Carrington’s marriage to Partridge, when they were visited by his friend, the writer Gerald Brenan, who, of course, fell in love with Carrington, adding yet another side to their already complex love polygon. Painted in shades of blue, green, grey and white, the composition is simple (and has been described as “primitive” or “naive”), with a white stone farmhouse and fence in the foreground, and white-clad mother and daughter figures holding hands on a grey path. The backdrop is of dark and undulating hills. “I sat and drew a white cottage and a barn … sitting on a little hill until it grew too cold,” Carrington wrote. “The trees are so marvellously solid, like trees in some old Titian pictures, and the houses such wonderful greys and whites, and the formation of the hills so varied.”²⁸ This painting was presented to Tate Britain in 1987 by Noel Carrington, and, in 2014, it was voted as one of the most popular artworks in Britain’s museums, second only to a work by David Hockney in a public vote of more than 38,000 people.²⁹ Indeed, Sir John Rothenstein, the former director of the Tate Gallery, wrote in 1976 that Carrington “has been the most neglected serious painter of her time”.³⁰

Dora Carrington, Spanish Landscape with Mountains, c1924. Oil on canvas. Tate: Bequeathed by Frances Partridge 2004. Photo: Tate.

Alongside this painting, we see Spanish Landscape with Mountains (1924), which similarly focuses on the rounded contours of hills. I don’t agree with the interpretations of these hills (or those in her Cumbrian painting) as suggestive of the female body, but the picture was begun at the height of Carrington’s and Brenan’s affair, with her writing to him: “I feel my picture is going to be one of the most beautiful in the world … Is it because you blessed it with that magic one night?”³¹ Like Gertler, Brenan was a long-suffering lover, whom Carrington pushed and pulled in an effort not to upset the status quo with Strachey and the hypocritical and irrationally angered Partridge. In his memoirs, Brenan wrote of Carrington: “Once she got under your skin, you couldn’t get her out.”³²

Carrington’s creativity stretched beyond the scope of paintings on canvas. In addition, she was a maker and a designer. Early on, she was very involved with the Omega Workshops (in large part because she needed the income), and she was commissioned to design and cut the woodblocks for the first publication of the Hogarth Press in 1917 – both endeavours run by members of the Bloomsbury Group.³³ The title of this exhibition, however, is Dora Carrington: Beyond Bloomsbury, and this is significant. While we know that Roger Fry thought well enough of Carrington’s work to employ her in 1917 on the restoration of Mantegna’s cartoons, The Triumphs of Caesar, at Hampton Court Palace, and to select her work for the Nameless exhibition in 1921,³⁴ it is also claimed that she sought his encouragement and advice in later years, only for him to discourage her from a career as a serious artist.³⁵ Whatever way you see it, Carrington was a part of Bloomsbury, and met Strachey through the group, but also stood outside and saw beyond it. As Strachey wrote to her, referring to Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell: “I rather felt that [they] were not quite perfect critics – they tend to want you to be like them, and not like yourself – which is really the only things it’s worth anyone’s while to be.”³⁶

Like the Bloomsberries, however, Carrington was a superb homemaker, in the sense that she transformed the bare shells of houses of which they took possession and turned them into homes, painting the walls and furniture, and decorating them with exotic materials and painted tiles. Tragically, none of her wall decorations at Tidmarsh have survived, but we know of them from photographs and letters.³⁷ The final room of the exhibition, painted yellow and pale blue, tries to recreate the sense of a domestic interior, through recreations of furnishings and by the showcasing of portraits of close friends. One artefact on display is the box gramophone Carrington painted for Alix Strachey (Lytton’s sister-in-law) in 1927, while she was recovering from a strained back after being thrown from a horse in Richmond Park. Decorated with all manner of instruments and exotic scenes, it is far more detailed than the painted furniture at Charleston.

The recreation of the tiled fireplace Carrington made for the marriage of Alec and Frances Penrose in 1930 shows the replicated Dutch Delft-style designs in violet and yellow on white, crowned with a visual pun on the couple’s names: a rose speared by a fountain pen, accompanied by the motto “no rose without a pen”. A sideline in painted tiles was another means by which Carrington brought in money. She bought tiles cheaply wholesale, decorated them, and sold them through London shops.³⁸

From 1924, Carrington also began to experiment with a new art form. She loved Victorian “treacle prints” and discovered she could make her own, painting directly on the backs of small panes of glass and incorporating bits of silver foil and tinsel paper from cigarette packets and sweet wrappers. She sold the resulting pictures – kitsch but appealing – to stores such as Fortnum & Mason. “My plan,” she wrote in a letter, “is to keep this minor talent as a means of making money in the winter, and in the spring and summer, do my serious painting. Flower pieces, boxers, balloons, volcanoes, tight rope dancers, Victorian beauties, soldiers, tropical botanical flowers, birds and fruits are a few of my subjects … The pictures only take two hours to make and some sell for 35/ or £2. So really the profit is enormous.”³⁹

Dora Carrington, E.M. Forster, 1920. Oil on canvas. National Portrait Gallery, London. Given by Frances Catherine Partridge (née Marshall), 1969. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

Among the portraits of friends in this room are what the gallery’s director, Simon Martin, describes as “three of the most evocative portraits of the literary figures in the Bloomsbury set … not purely experiments in significant form and colour, but intimate portrayals of the inner life of those writers”.⁴⁰ While her painting of EM Forster (1920) is fairly traditional, the one of David Garnett (1919) is much more experimental, with looser brushwork and brighter, cleaner colours. Each portrait is done in a very different and unique style, as if she were choosing the best means for representing her friends’ individual characters. The third portrait is, of course, her one of Strachey (1916). Hill writes: “With her portrait of Lytton, Carrington established her voice as uniquely, identifiably her own. It took about two months and all the while she was brimming with confidence because she knew she had pulled it off, writing in her diary on 1 January 1917 when she had finished: ‘I wonder what you will think of it when you see it. I sit here, almost every night it sometimes seems, looking at your picture, now tonight it looks wonderfully good, and I am happy. But then I dread showing it. I should like to go on always painting you every week, wasting the afternoon loitering, and never, never showing you what I paint. It’s marvellous having it all to oneself. No agony of the soul. Is it vanity? No because I don’t care for what they say. I hate only the indecency of showing them what I have loved.’”⁴¹

Caws notes that, in his portraits, Strachey is invariably depicted, his long legs crossed, in a chair whose form he seems to fit, with a book. “Lytton-and-book is a familiar figure,” she says.⁴² Yet everything about Carrington’s version tends towards the hagiographic,⁴³ and the quite remarkably exaggerated right hand – more than a little El Greco – which makes this portrait so riveting, was a development that occurred in paint, since the studies for this picture show his hands crossed over on an open page of the book. Caws goes on to propose that this portrait of Strachey is, in fact, Carrington’s best self-portrait, since: “In so painting the man she adored, she was, in a sense, painting what mattered most to herself about herself, through him.”⁴⁴ This makes sense, particularly if you think of Auguste Rodin’s many sculptures of hands, used to portray a variety of intense emotions. By contrast, the hands of Mrs Box, a Cornish farmer’s wife whom Carrington painted in 1919, are “clumsy, almost childish … with the fingers nearly the same length”. There is nothing of the creative or educated there, just a pair of hands designed for manual and domestic work. Similarly, Caws describes her facial expression as “that of a person somewhat on guard, of a peasant reserve”.⁴⁵ Gerzina also notes the symbolism in Mrs Box’s hands and face, writing:

“This work shows how much her ability had matured since she had first begun to win prizes at the Slade. Looking like a quintessential Cornish farmer’s wife, Mrs Box is dressed in the oldest of fashions: a large, beribboned bonnet, and full, patterned clothes, sitting grimly with her hands folded in her ample lap. This portrait is extremely subtle in colouring: the red-orange of the patterned sleeves is counterpointed by the dark background of the armchair and the blue-greens of the wall and her other clothing. But the greatest artistry appears in the figure, for both the hands and the face, while partially shadowed, are illuminated to reveal a finely detailed realism.”⁴⁶

Dora Carrington, Mrs Box, 1919, Oil on canvas. The Higgins Bedford. Purchased from Christopher Mason with grants from the Victoria & Albert Museum Purchase Grant Fund and the Art Fund, 2006 The Higgins Bedford.

The exhibition closes with a couple of further recreations: a trompe-l’oeil bookcase Carrington painted for Strachey at Ham Spray, over an unused door in his library, with comedic mock titles, such as Deception by Jane Austen and The Empty Room by Virginia Woolf,⁴⁷ and a trompe-l’oeil window, painted at Biddesden House, for the then Diana Guinness – one of the Mitford sisters, who went on to remarry the fascist MP Oswald Mosley. This painting of a woman and a cat sitting by a window immortalised Carrington’s cat, Tiber. A letter to Strachey expresses how serious Carrington was about this commission, working outdoors in all types of weather to complete it: “Darling Lytton! Oh dear! Inanimate objects are very animated down here! I can pay no attention to elections and tariffs when motorcars refuse to start, scissors disappear and gloves walk off and hide themselves. I got up at half past seven this morning in order to start my picture at Biddesden early. Then, typically as you would say, the moment I started to paint it came on to rain. So all my paints got mixed with water. My hair dripped into my eyes, and my feet became icy cold.” In the end, Carrington is said to have considered this painting her only successful work – primarily because Strachey liked it.⁴⁸

When Strachey became ill in 1931 with (misdiagnosed) stomach cancer, Carrington attempted to take her own life but was thwarted by Partridge. After Strachey’s death, in January 1932, however, she wrote: “He was, and this is why he was everything to me, the only person to whom I never needed to lie, because he never expected me to be anything different to what I was, and he was never curious if I did not tell him things … No one will ever know the utter happiness of our life together.”⁴⁹ In a letter to Bingham, she continued: “What does anything mean to me now without you. I see my paints and think it is no use, for Lytton will never see my pictures now, and I cry.”⁵⁰ Despite Partridge and friends being vigilant, Carrington succeeded, only a few weeks later, in fatally (if not immediately so) shooting herself. Apparently, there was no funeral, and no one now remembers what became of Carrington’s body.⁵¹ In many ways, this tragic end to her life has led to Carrington becoming mythologised as something of a cult figure; a tragic female artist like Frida Kahlo, but remember, this “melancholly” was not her all. Caws writes: “Carrington was an enthusiast. Carrington’s art takes much of its charm and instantly recognised spontaneous quality from just those traits of character which all her friends recognised, allied with her delightfully (and sometimes tragically) apparent childlike sense of life.”⁵²

Years earlier, Carrington had written to Brenan: “I often hope I shall die at 40 … I could not bear the ignominy of becoming a stout boring elderly lady with a hobby of sketching in watercolours.”⁵³ That certainly would never have happened, even had she survived. The complexity of her deceptively simple-seeming character, youthful yet aged beyond her years, is summed up by Smith in her introduction, and I end with her evocative words:

“She was who she was, she was Carrington, maverick, gifted, charming, bewildering, self-deprecating to a fault, a lover of speeding along on a bike or a motorcycle or a horse, a vigorous lover of dancing and fun, a mischief-maker, an excellent practical joker. A deeply private person who felt the opposite of privacy as a kind of indecency: ‘Please burn this letter,’ she pleads in so much of her correspondence. She was more ‘wild moorland pony’ than country house guest, as Ottoline Morrell … described her; clearly a flame to many moths, Carrington was simultaneously promissory and skilfully evasive, staying true to her own multiplicitous essentiality. Throughout her life, throughout her work, she stayed resolutely unpindownable as if this, too, was an ethic.”⁵⁴

References
1. Pallant House Gallery uses her first name in the exhibition title, Dora Carrington: Beyond Bloomsbury, to avoid confusion with Leonora Carrington and any other artists sharing the surname. In all other exhibition texts, Carrington alone is used.
2. “A Communion of Spirit”: Carrington, Mark Gertler and the Slade by Sarah MacDougall in Dora Carrington: Beyond Bloomsbury, Pallant House Gallery, exhibition catalogue, 2024, pages 53-83, page 55.
3. Becoming Carrington by Jane Hill in exh cat, op cit, pages 115-133, page 116.
4. Experiments in Living: Carrington’s Search for Love by Anne Chisholm, in exh cat, op cit, pages 23-47, page 28.
5. MacDougall, op cit, page 60.
6. Carringon: A Life by Gretchen Gerzina, WW Norton & Company, 1989, page 50.
7. The Art of Dora Carrington by Jane Hill, The Herbert Press, 1994, page 22.
8. Mark Gertler: Selected Letters by Noel Carrington, Rupert Hart-Davis, 1965, page 111.
9. Women of Bloomsbury: Virginia, Vanessa and Carrington by Mary Ann Caws, Routledge, 1990, 2018 edition, page 147.
10. Foreword by Simon Martin in exh cat, op cit, pages 6-13, page 6.
11. Introduction by Ali Smith in exh cat, op cit, pages 14-17, page 14.
12. Caws, op cit, page 119.
13. Carrington’s Letters edited by Anne Chisholm, Chatto and Windus, 2017, page 407.
14. Love in Bloomsbury by Frances Partridge, first published by Little, Brown and Company, 1981, new edition published by Tauris Parke, 2021, page 97.
15. Hill, op cit, page 34.
16. Partridge, op cit, page 95.
17. Gerzina, op cit, page 131.
18. ibid, page 161.
19. Bloomsbury Women: Distinct Figures in Life and Art by Jan Marsh, Henry Holt and Company, 1995, page 105.
20. Partridge, op cit, pages 95-96.
21. Gerzina, op cit, page 146.
22. Caws, op cit, page 117.
23. ibid, page 120.
24. ibid, page 116.
25. Marsh, op cit, page 118.
26. ibid, page 122.
27. Gerzina, op cit, page xviii.
28. ibid, page 179.
29. Martin, exh cat, op cit, page 6.
30. Gerzina, op cit, page xv.
31. Marsh, op cit, page 117.
32. Caws, op cit, page 117.
33. Hill, op cit, pages 38-39.
34. ibid.
35. Gerzina, op cit, page 69.
36. ibid, page 162.
37. Carrington at Home by Ariane Banks in exh cat, op cit, pages 85-109, page 90.
38. Gerzina, op cit, page 255.
39. Letter to Alix Strachey, 4 February 1924 or 1925, cited in Bankes, exh cat, op cit, page 98.
40. Martin, exh cat, op cit, page 8.
41. Hill, op cit, page 32. 
42. Caws, op cit, page 148.
43. ibid, page 177.
44. ibid, page 148.
45. ibid, pages 146-47.
46. Gerzina, op cit, page 118.
47. This mural still exists – it might be the only one of the many she made – but the property is privately owned and not open to the general public.
48. Gerzina, op cit, page 289.
49. Marsh, op cit, page 124.
50. Caws, op cit, page 180.
51. Gerzina, op cit, page xxiv.
52. Caws, op cit, page 137.
53. The Bloomsbury Group by Frances Spalding, National Portrait Gallery Publications, 1997, page 39.
54. Smith, op cit, page 16.