Carrington at Pallant House, until April 27

Posted by Barbara on January 6, 2025 in Art, Blog, Exhibition, feminism, women artists | 4 comments

It feels a bit like buses; you end the year writing about an artist called Carrington and start the next year in similar vein. Dora Carrington was born in 1893, 24 years before Leonora and was not related to her. She also had the good fortune to have parents who encouraged her precocious artistic talent and did not prepare her to be a debutante. Instead they paid for extra art lessons, and in 1910 at the age of 17 Carrington (she dropped her first name) enrolled at the Slade School of Art in London.

Pallant House Gallery in Chichester is hosting the first museum exhibition of works by Carrington in almost 30 years.  As a significant contributor to modern British art during the interwar years and an associate of the Bloomsbury Group, Carrington was described as ‘the most neglected serious painter of her time’ by former Tate Director Sir John Rothenstein. Her talent and skill are evident throughout, starting with some of the earliest works she made at the Slade.

The move to London and the independence it brought at such a young age was a liberation. Carrington joined other women students in cutting her hair to become one of the ‘cropheads’ – as Virginia Woolf called them. Her fellow artists included John Nash, C.R.W. Nevinson and Mark Gertler, all of whom adored her. She was a brilliant draughtswoman – her drawings and paintings of the human form are extraordinary.  Her pencil stroke and details are outstanding.

There are some wonderfully intimate pictures of her family; a pencil portrait of her younger brother Noel is exquisitely drawn, and an oil painting of her father, whose health suffered in retirement, draws you near to the armchair where he sits, a rug over his knees.

Unlike her namesake Leonora, this Carrington was able to live as unconventional a life as she wished in her native country.  Despite her love and fascination for Lytton Strachey, she married Ralph Partridge so all three of them could live together in what Carrington described as a ‘triangular unity of happiness’.  However, this ménage à trois ended when Partridge fell in love with writer Frances Marshall, who was also connected to the Bloomsbury Group.   

It is hard to categorise Carrington’s art; she explored portraits and landscapes, and painted the people of her artistic circle, female and male, nude and clothed.  There is a pen and ink portrait of Henrietta Bingham with whom she had a relationship, and she wrote to a friend: ’I now feel regret at being such a blasted fool in the past, to stifle so many lusts I had in my youth, for various females.’

Her paintings acknowledge influences of other leading artists; a painting of a tree at Tidmarsh Mill owes much to Cezanne. She went on walking and motoring tours in the UK and abroad and revelled in the different landscapes. Her ‘Spanish Landscape with Mountains’ from a visit to Andalucia is surreal and shimmering.

She also worked in applied and decorative arts; there are some beautiful bookplates on display, as well as a hand painted HMV gramophone cabinet.  There are some home movies too – footage of her with Strachey and others, and despite her sexual exploration with men and women, she could never get over her love for Strachey. Two months after his death, she borrowed a gun from a friend and shot herself.  She was only 38.