Dora Carrington

Dora de Houghton Carrington (1893-1932), 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". 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.

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. She attended the all-girls' Bedford High School, which emphasised 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.

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, C.R.W. Nevinson and Mark Gertler. All at one time or another were in love with her, as was Nash's younger brother John Nash, who hoped to marry her. Gertler pursued Carrington for a number of years, and they had a brief sexual relationship during the years of the First World War.

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 hairstyle (before it was fashionable) and somewhat androgynous appearance, she was troubled by her sexuality; she is believed by some to have had an affair with Henrietta Bingham. She also had a romantic relationship with the writer Gerald Brenan.

Carrington first lived 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. 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.

In 1926, 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 they began an affair and also collaborated on the making of three films. Penrose wanted Carrington exclusively for himself, but that was a commitment she refused to make because of her love for Strachey. The affair ended when Carrington became pregnant and had an abortion.

During her lifetime, Carrington's work received no critical attention. Her work can be described as progressive and did not fit into the mainstream of art in England at the time. Part of her work included Victorian-style pictures, which were made from coloured tinfoil and paper. Carrington included pen sketches in letters to her friends. 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. 

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". 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 ...". 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". Upon his death, Strachey left Carrington £10,000 (roughly the equivalent of £576,000 in 2023).

Dora Carrington died by suicide on 11 March 1932, two months after Strachey's death, using a gun borrowed from her friend, Bryan Guinness. Her body was cremated and the ashes buried under the laurels in the garden of Ham Spray House.