Dora de Houghton Carrington (29 March 1893 – 11 March 1932), known generally as Carrington, was an English painter and decorative artist, remembered in part for her association with members of the Bloomsbury Group, especially the writer Lytton Strachey. From her time as an art student, she was known simply by her surname as she considered Dora to be "vulgar and sentimental".[1] She was not well known as a painter during her lifetime, as she rarely exhibited and did not sign her work. She worked for a while at the Omega Workshops, and for the Hogarth Press, designing woodcuts.[2]
Carrington was born in Hereford, England, to railway engineer Samuel Carrington, who worked for the East India Company, and Charlotte (née Houghton). They had married in 1888 and had five children together of whom Dora was their fourth.[3][1] She attended the all-girls' Bedford High School which emphasized art, and her parents paid for her to receive extra lessons in drawing. She won a number of awards in the national school competitions organised by the Royal Drawing Society.[1]
In 1910, she went to the Slade School of Art in central London where she subsequently won a scholarship and several other prizes; her fellow students included Dorothy Brett, Paul Nash, Christopher R. W. Nevinson and Mark Gertler.[4] All at one time or another were in love with her, as was Nash's younger brother John Nash, who hoped to marry her.[5][6] Gertler pursued Carrington for a number of years, and they had a brief sexual relationship during the years of the First World War.[7]
During 1912, Carrington attended a series of lectures by Mary Sargant Florence on fresco painting. The following year, she and Constance Lane completed three large frescoes for a library at Ashridge in the Chilterns.[1] Plans, with John and Paul Nash, for a cycle of frescoes for a church in Uxbridge near London came to nothing with the start of the War.[1] After graduating from the Slade, although short of money, Carrington stayed in London, living in Soho with a studio in Chelsea.[1] Her paintings were included in a number of group exhibitions, including with the New English Art Club, and she stopped signing and dating her work.[1] In 1914 Carrington's parents moved to Ibthorpe House in the village of Hurstbourne Tarrant in Hampshire, and shortly afterwards she moved there and set up her studio in an outbuilding.[1]
Carrington was not a member of the Bloomsbury Group, though she was closely associated with Bloomsbury and, more generally, with "Bohemian" attitudes, through her long relationship with the homosexual writer Lytton Strachey, whom she first met in 1916. Distinguished by her cropped pageboy hair style (before it was fashionable) and somewhat androgynous appearance, she was troubled by her sexuality; she is known to have had an affair with Henrietta Bingham.[citation needed] She also had a significant relationship with the writer Gerald Brenan.
In June 1918, Virginia Woolf wrote of Carrington in her diary: "She is odd from her mixture of impulse & self consciousness. I wonder sometimes what she’s at: so eager to please, conciliatory, restless, & active.... [B]ut she is such a bustling eager creature, so red & solid, & at the same time inquisitive, that one can’t help liking her."[8] Carrington first set up house with Lytton Strachey in November 1917, when they moved together to Tidmarsh Mill House, near Pangbourne, Berkshire. Carrington met Ralph Partridge, an Oxford friend of her younger brother Noel, in 1918. Partridge fell in love with Carrington and eventually, in 1921, Carrington agreed to marry him, not for love but to hold the ménage à trois together.[9] Strachey paid for the wedding, and accompanied the couple on their honeymoon in Venice. The three moved to Ham Spray House in Wiltshire in 1924; the house had been purchased by Strachey in the name of Partridge.[10]
In 1926, Ralph Partridge began an affair with Frances Marshall, and left to live with her in London. His marriage to Carrington was effectively over, but he continued to visit her most weekends. In 1928 Carrington met Bernard Penrose, a friend of Partridge and the younger brother of the artist Roland Penrose, and began an affair with him. The affair energized Carrington's artistic creativity, and she also collaborated with Penrose on the making of three films. However, Penrose wanted Carrington exclusively for himself, a commitment she refused to make because of her love for Strachey. The affair, her last with a man, ended when Carrington became pregnant and had an abortion.
During her lifetime, Carrington's work received no critical attention. The lack of encouragement may have kept her from displaying her artwork. Carrington's work can be described as progressive, because it did not fit into the mainstream of art in England at the time. In fact, her work was not considered art at all. It featured Victorian-style pictures which were made from coloured tinfoil and paper. Carrington included pen sketches in letters to her friends, with the intention of entertaining them. She also created woodblock prints, which were highly regarded. Her lesser-known work included painted pub signs and murals, ceramics, fireplaces, and tin trunks.
Carrington was better known for her landscape paintings, which have been linked to surrealism. Her landscapes blend the facts of visual perception with interior desires and fantasies. One work of art, Mountain Ranges from Yegen, Andalusia, 1924, shows the split in perspectives. There is an intimate foreground, and there is in the distance a view of the mountains. The main focus, on the middle mountains, exhibit the texture of human skin. This merges the notion of the personal being made public.[11]
Relationship with Lytton Strachey
For many years, Carrington's art was neglected by the public, and her main notoriety was her relationship with Lytton Strachey. On the day that she agreed to marry Partridge she wrote to Strachey, who was in Italy, what has been described as "one of the most moving love letters in the English language".[12] She wrote, "I cried last night Lytton, whilst he slept by my side sleeping happily—I cried to think of a savage cynical fate which had made it impossible for my love ever to be used by you...". Strachey wrote back that "you do know very well that I love you as something more than a friend, you angelic creature, whose goodness to me has made me happy for years, and whose presence in my life has been and always will be, one of the most important things in my life ...".[13] On his deathbed Strachey said, "I always wanted to marry Carrington and I never did". His biographer calls that sentiment "not true; but he could not have said anything more deeply consoling".[14] Upon his death, Strachey left Carrington £10,000 (the equivalent of £240,000 in 1994).[15]
Death
Mountain Ranges from Yegen, Andalusia, 1924, by Dora Carrington
Dora Carrington killed herself on 11 March 1932, two months after Strachey's death, using a gun borrowed from her friend, Hon. Bryan Guinness (later 2nd Baron Moyne).[4] Her body was cremated and the ashes buried under the laurels in the garden of Ham Spray House.
Legacy
An accomplished painter of portraits, landscape and still-life, Carrington also worked in applied and decorative arts, painting on any type of surface she had at hand including inn signs, tiles and furniture. She also decorated pottery and designed the library at Ham Spray. In 1970 David Garnett published a selection of letters and extracts from her diary, since which time critical and popular appreciation of her work has risen sharply.[16] In 1978, Sir John Rothenstein, for nearly thirty years Director of the Tate Gallery, London, called Dora Carrington "the most neglected serious painter of her time."[17] Carrington was one of the five artists featured in the television series Five Women Painters made in 1989 by the Arts Council and Channel 4,[18] with accompanying book published by Lennard.[19] In 1995 she was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery in London.[20] Two of her works are in the Tate Gallery.[21]
In his first novel Crome Yellow,Aldous Huxley based the character of Mary Bracegirdle on Carrington, and described how she and he slept on the roof of "Lollipop Hall", based on Lady Ottoline Morrell's home. He chose the name "Bracegirdle" because of Dora's chastity.[1]
The Bloomsbury Group—or Bloomsbury Set—was a group of associated English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists in the first half of the 20th century, including Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster and Lytton Strachey. This loose collective of friends and relatives was closely associated with the University of Cambridge for the men and King's College London for the women, and they lived, worked or studied together near Bloomsbury, London. According to Ian Ousby, "although its members denied being a group in any formal sense, they were united by an abiding belief in the importance of the arts." Their works and outlook deeply influenced literature, aesthetics, criticism, and economics as well as modern attitudes towards feminism, pacifism, and sexuality.
Lady Ottoline Violet Anne Morrell was an English aristocrat and society hostess. Her patronage was influential in artistic and intellectual circles, where she befriended writers including Aldous Huxley, Siegfried Sassoon, T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence, and artists including Mark Gertler, Dora Carrington and Gilbert Spencer.
Giles Lytton Strachey was an English writer and critic. A founding member of the Bloomsbury Group and author of Eminent Victorians, he established a new form of biography in which psychological insight and sympathy are combined with irreverence and wit. His biography Queen Victoria (1921) was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
Vanessa Bell was an English painter and interior designer, a member of the Bloomsbury Group and the sister of Virginia Woolf.
Sir Michael de Courcy Fraser Holroyd is an English biographer.
Dorothy Bussy was an English novelist and translator, close to the Bloomsbury Group.
Mark Gertler, born Marks Gertler, was a British painter of figure subjects, portraits and still-life.
Boris Vasilyevich Anrep was a Russian artist, active in Britain, who devoted himself to the art of mosaic. In Britain, he is known for his monumental mosaics at the National Gallery, London, Westminster Cathedral and the Bank of England. Being close to the Bloomsbury Group, he was a noticeable figure in London social and intellectual life from 1912 up to the mid-1960s. In Ireland, he is known for his mosaics at Christ the King Cathedral, Mullingar. In Russia, he is associated with the Silver Age of Russian Poetry as the addressee of many beautiful poems by Anna Akhmatova, including her Tale of the Black Ring. Anrep was also friendly with Nikolay Gumilyov, an outstanding poet and Akhmatova's husband, and Nikolay Nedobrovo, a talented critic, two prominent figures of the 1910s in Saint Petersburg.
Carrington is a 1995 British biographical film written and directed by Christopher Hampton about the life of the English painter Dora Carrington (1893–1932), who was known simply as "Carrington". The screenplay is based on Lytton Strachey: A Critical Biography, the 1967-68 two-volume biography of writer and critic Lytton Strachey (1880–1932) by Michael Holroyd.
Edward FitzGerald "Gerald" Brenan, CBE, MC was a British writer and hispanist who spent much of his life in Spain.
South from Granada is a 2003 Spanish comedy film directed by Fernando Colomo which stars Matthew Goode as Gerald Brenan, a demobilized British soldier who in 1919 rents a house for a year in a village in Alpujarra, alongside Verónica Sánchez and Guillermo Toledo.
South from Granada: Seven Years in an Andalusian Village is an autobiographical book by Gerald Brenan, first published in 1957.
Frances Catherine Partridge CBE was an English writer. Closely connected to the Bloomsbury Group, she is probably best known for the publication of her diaries. She married Ralph Partridge in 1933. The couple had one son, (Lytton) Burgo Partridge (1935–1963).
Saxon Arnoll Sydney-Turner was a member of the Bloomsbury Group who worked as a British civil servant throughout his life.
Reginald Sherring Partridge,, generally known as Ralph Partridge, was a member of the Bloomsbury Group. He worked for Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf, married Dora Carrington and then Frances Marshall, and was the unrequited love of Lytton Strachey.
The Bloomsbury Group plays a prominent role in the LGBT history of its day.
Mary Barnes Hutchinson was a British short-story writer, socialite, model and a member of the Bloomsbury Group.
Valentine Dobrée (1894–1974) was a visual artist, novelist and poet.
Henrietta Bingham was a wealthy American journalist, newspaper executive and horse breeder. When she was twelve, she was present when her mother was killed in a road accident which traumatized the whole family. She subsequently developed a very close relationship with her father who took a long time to recognize her lesbianism although eventually he became reconciled to her sexuality. In the 1920s she became an anglophile flapper and she associated with the Bloomsbury Group. In 1935 she purchased and ran a Kentucky estate for breeding thoroughbred racehorses. Her 1954 marriage, after a succession of partners, men and women, was unsuccessful.
↑ Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina (1989). Carrington - A Life. p.299.
↑ Elinor, Gillian (Spring–Summer 1984). "Vanessa Bell and Dora Carrington:Bloomsbury Painters". Woman's Art Journal. 5 (Woman's Art Inc): 28–43. doi:10.2307/1357882. JSTOR1357882.
Noel Carrington. Carrington, Paintings, Drawings and Decorations. Oxford: Oxford Polytechnic Press, 1978; New York, Thames & Hudson, 1980. Foreword by Sir John Rothenstein.
(in Spanish)Gerald Brenan. Diarios sobre Dora Carrington y otros escritos (1925-1932). Editorial Confluencias, 2012.
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