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<\/a>Here\u2019s your starter for 10: In May 2024 who became the most successful female artist in UK history in terms of sales? Her painting Les Distractions de Dagobert<\/em> (1945) was sold at Sotheby\u2019s in New York for USD$28.5 million. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Dames, we are talking about Leonora Carrington; born in 1917, this extraordinary artist came from a privileged upper middle class English background that she rejected as soon as was possible. I recently visited a major retrospective of her work on show at Newlands House Gallery in Sussex, which ends on 24 October.<\/p>\n\n\n Describing Carrington just as an \u2018artist\u2019 does not do justice to the range of her expression. As well as the visual arts, she wrote plays and stories, many of which articulated the repression she experienced as a little girl. She had three brothers, all of whom were allowed much more freedom than she. Her parents sent her to a convent boarding school, where she rebelled and was asked to leave. Later she was sent to finishing schools in Florence and Paris; she loathed the expectations put on her by the establishments, but adored the art, particularly Renaissance art in Italy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She abhorred the \u2018cattle market\u2019 \u2013 the term used to describe the London Season, when young girls \u2018came out\u2019. Carrington wrote The Debutante<\/em> to express her disdain for this; in it she sends a hyena to take her place at one such ball.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Carrington ran away to Paris, and joined the artists living and working there. She met Max Ernst and he was her lover until his imprisonment as an enemy alien at the outbreak of World War II. She suffered depression, was hospitalised, moved to Spain and then to Mexico City where she made her home.<\/p>\n\n\n<\/a>