Dora Carrington

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Dora de Houghton Carrington (March 29, 1893 – March 11, 1932) was a British painter and decorative artist.

[edit] Early life

Born in Hereford, England, she attended a girls' high school that emphasized art and her parents paid for her to attend extra lessons in drawing. She won a scholarship to the Slade School of Art in London where she met the brothers Paul Nash and John Nash, Christopher R.W. Nevinson and Mark Gertler. All at one time or another were in love with her. Gertler in particular pursued Carrington for a number of years.

She went by the surname Carrington since her time at the Slade School of Art; it was common practice at the Slade for students to refer to each other by surnames only. She was not well known as a painter during her lifetime as she did not sign her work and only rarely exhibited, though she did work for a while at the Omega Workshop.

[edit] Career and personal life

She was not a member of the Bloomsbury Group, but was peripherally associated with Bloomsbury and, more generally with "Bohemian" attitudes, through her longtime relationship with the homosexual writer Lytton Strachey, and her occasional lesbian affairs.

Two of her documented love affairs were with Mark Gertler, who was an esteemed English painter of the period, and the writer Gerald Brenan. She married Ralph Partridge, but lived most of her life with Strachey. He died of cancer in January 1932. Carrington shot herself fatally two months later after a previous attempt to take her own life by asphyxiation from car exhaust. Partridge was able to intervene in the first suicide attempt but could not save her from the second attempt. She simply did not want to live without Strachey whom she deeply loved. Carrington's life with Strachey was dramatized in the 1995 film Carrington, starring Emma Thompson in the title role.

An accomplished painter of both portraits and landscape, she 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. Carrington designed the library at Ham Spray, the house in Ham, Wiltshire where she lived with Strachey and Partridge.

Since about 1970, critical and popular appreciation of her work has risen sharply.