If you want a new year treat, then go and see Dora Carrington: Beyond Bloomsbury, at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester. The first major exhibition for 30 years of this little-known artist brings together over 100 works by Carrington (1893-1932) and her contemporaries.
As well as some stunning artwork and examples of her many illustrated letters to friends, the exhibition highlights Carrington’s bohemian and creative lifestyle, major relationships and bisexuality.
Early talent
After a conventional and somewhat stifling upbringing, Carrington trained at the Slade in 1910, the first art school to allow female students to draw life models. Her tutor Henry Tonks, who also taught Gwen John, described her as a “crisis of brilliance”.
A beautiful pencil portrait of her brother Noel (1912) shows Carrington’s observational skills and attention to detail. Sketches of nude women and (slightly draped) men also show her early talent. A prize-winning painting, Female Figure Lying on her Back (1912), is particularly striking and led to a two-year scholarship at the Slade.
At the same time, Carrington started to redefine her identity. She and other women at the Slade challenged the norms of the time by cutting their hair into a bob style, called “cropheads” somewhat disparagingly by Virginia Woolf. Carrington stopped using her first name – “I dislike the Victorian sentimentality of Dora” – and often dressed in trousers. This bold, androgynous look is captured in her self-portrait (1913).
Carrington’s contemporaries at the Slade – Mark Gertler, Paul and John Nash – were all in love with her. She and Gertler had a long and significant friendship, but his love was largely unrequited. Gertler’s tender portrait of Carrington (1913) is in the exhibition, together with Dorothy Brett’s sensual nude painting of her.
Lytton Strachey: enduring love
Soon after she left the Slade, Carrington met Lytton Strachey, a founding member of the Bloomsbury group, homosexual and 13 years her senior. Their complex, largely platonic relationship was to last the rest of their lives, and endured multiple liaisons on both sides.
Perhaps Carrington’s best-known painting is her sensitive portrait of Strachey reading (1916), showing his long fingers and beard. She captures his apparent absorption in a book and his remoteness.
By 1917, Carrington and Strachey had set up home together at Tidmarsh Mill in Berkshire, where Strachey wrote and Carrington painted prolifically, though she did not exhibit. Her 1918 oil painting of the Mill is beautifully tranquil, with two black swans on the mill pond which are said to represent her and Strachey. The couple later moved to Ham Spray in Wiltshire, where they spent many years.
“He was everything to me,” Carrington wrote about Strachey. “He never expected me to be anything different to what I was.”
Open marriage and travel
In 1921, Carrington reluctantly married Ralph Partridge, with whom Strachey was in love, in order to maintain a “triangular trinity of happiness”. A sensual pencil sketch (1919) shows the naked Partridge’s athletic form.
Carrington’s art was at its height during the 1920s, enhanced by travels in the Lake District, France and Spain. The exhibition has a beautiful watercolour of Wastwater (c.1921), as well as the majestic oil painting, Farm at Watendlath (1921), with its towering hills and small figures beneath. These show Carrington’s affinity with nature and expressive ability.
I loved Larrau in the Snow (1922) with its snow-covered rooftops and walls. In contrast, probably my favourite work in the whole exhibition was Spanish Landscape with Mountains (1924) [see main image] of Yegen, Granada. This striking, rather surreal oil painting shows fleshy orange hills, with cacti in front and mountains behind. Partridge’s writer friend, Gerald Brenan, lived in Yegen, and Carrington embarked on a sporadic affair with him.
In 1924, Carrington had a passionate relationship with tall, American socialite Henrietta Bingham and captured her feelings in a sensual, nude drawing of her. Carrington was also attracted to Strachey’s niece Julia; an oil portrait shows Julia in a rather imperious-looking headdress.
Decorative art and legacy
Despite affairs, the unconventional ménage à trois between Carrington, Strachey and Partridge lasted some years. A photo of the threesome at Ham Spray House is the picture of domesticity.
Carrington poured her creativity into decorative projects in her own and friends’ homes, painting ceramics and furniture, most of which (unlike those of Vanessa Bell) have sadly not survived. She also created unusual ‘tinsel’ paintings, on glass and tinfoil, some of which are shown in Pallant House.
When Strachey died in early 1932, Carrington was heartbroken and took her own life two months later, aged only 38. She remained largely undiscovered until the 1970s. Former Tate director Sir John Rothenstein called her “the most neglected serious painter of her time”.
Before visiting the exhibition, I knew little about Carrington. As well as the brilliant artwork, much never previously exhibited, I came away with a strong sense of a charismatic and often mischievous young woman – in the naked photo of her climbing a statue or in the vintage footage of her swimming with friends.
Carrington was a talented artist, an unconventional and independent woman ahead of her time, who made a lasting impression on all those she met. As Julia Strachey described her, Carrington was “a creation in fire, feeling and style”.
Dora Carrington: Beyond Bloomsbury is at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester until 27 April 2025.
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