Dora carrington biography

If mononymic names are now par for the course, artist Carrington – or, as she was born, Dora Carrington – was a pioneer: she was known by only her surname in the early 20th century. That, however, is only one example of how she spurned convention. A new exhibition, ‘Beyond Bloomsbury’, at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, West Sussex, explores a life lived among better-known names, including Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry and her great (if largely platonic) love, writer Lytton Strachey.

‘She embraced this wonderfully fluid bohemian lifestyle,’ says co-curator Ariane Banks. ‘She loved men, she loved women, she was very fluid in the way she lived, loved and worked.’ This extended to her style. Studying at the Slade in London, Carrington and some friends bobbed their hair ten years before it was fashionable, leading Woolf to dub them ‘the crop heads’. A self-portrait, meanwhile, shows her wearing trousers.

Carrington’s paintings chime with the vivid naturalism of other Bloomsbury artists, like Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. The exhibition includes landscapes where the hills look alive, portraits of Strachey and associates including EM Forster, simple still lifes and slightly fantastical doodles, like a naked woman with a cat in her lap.

Banks says this mixture comes from a diverse set of influences. ‘Cezanne was her lodestar from the moment that she first encountered his work, but she also loved canal boats, English signs. She loved the circus and the music hall.’ As well as painting, Carrington produced designs for both the Omega Workshop (founded by the Bloomsbury Group, creating objects for the home) and publisher Hogarth Press, demonstrating that her aesthetic could go beyond the canvas.

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Though not generally considered a key member of the Bloomsbury Group, painter, decorative artist, and early feminist Dora Carrington lived at the heart of the group, and her association with them has seen her name added to many Bloomsbury-fringe lists.

A bohemian and maverick who liked to play with boundaries, Dora’s personal life was as interesting as her art. She was involved in one of Bloomsbury’s most famous menages a trois - loved, and was loved by both men and women and artistically drew from several significant movements, including Impressionism, Primitivism and Surrealism.

Dora Carrington was born Dora de Houghton Carrington in a house named Ivy Lodge in Hereford on the 29th of March She was the fourth of five children of Charlotte Houghton, a governess, and Samuel Carrington, a railway engineer.

Although Carrington adored and revered her father, sketching him almost obsessively, she did not admire her fussy, martyr-like mother, who crammed the house with ornaments and devoted herself to charity work and religious causes.

From an early age, Dora used art as a means of escape. When the family moved to Bedford, she attended Bedford High School, where her talents were recognised and encouraged, and she attended extra art classes in the afternoon. In , aged seventeen, she won a scholarship to study at the Slade School of Fine Art.

At school, Dora's work was indifferent except in natural history and art, but her great talent for drawing and painting was obvious to everyone

The Slade, the art school of University College, London, was founded in and had an outstanding reputation with alumni including Walter Sickert and Augustus John. Though prestigious, it was less traditional than its neighbour, the Royal Academy of Art, and Dora embraced her new found-freedom, cutting off her long hair into a short bob - very daring in the days before the ‘flapper’ hairstyle of the s - dropping her first name and

Summary of Dora Carrington

Dora Carrington's impressive body of work is often overshadowed by the fiery dramas of her personal and romantic life. Indeed it can be difficult to ignore her many unconventional romances, her ambiguous sexual identity, and the dramatic suicide that ended her life when she was only thirty-eight years old. But looking beyond her sensational biography and carefully examining her work - which took the form of both painting and decorative arts - reveals an artist with a singular perspective. She was an artist who did not allow herself to be hemmed in by the trends of contemporary art. Instead, Carrington brought a unique blend of styles to her work, drawing from movements as disparate as Impressionism, Primitivism, and Surrealism. Most of her paintings are landscapes and portraits, and her sensitive rendering of her subjects reveals an artist with a keen eye who made an unrivalled contribution to European art of the early century.

Accomplishments

• Working in a variety of styles, Carrington defied the artistic conventions of her contemporaries. Regardless of the style she worked in, a certain psychological depth was always there. From the penetrating intimacy of her portraits to the symbolism and mystery of her landscapes, emotional depth was a hallmark of her work.
• Carrington was virtually unknown for her art during her own lifetime and seems to have received little encouragement from her peers to exhibit her work. It was not until the latter half of the 20 century that her work received widespread recognition.
• Although her work does not overtly address feminism or women's issues, both Carrington's lack of critical recognition and her interest in "feminine" subjects - landscapes of her home, decorative arts, portraits of personal acquaintances - subtly reveal the perspectives of women in early-century Europe, especially the struggles of women artists working in that context.

Important Art by Dora Carrington

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British painter and decorative artist (–)

Dora de Houghton Carrington (29 March – 11 March ), 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.

Early life

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 and had five children together of whom Dora was their fourth. She attended the all-girls' Bedford High School which emphasized 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 , 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.

During , Carrington attended a series of lectures by Mary Sargant Florence on fresco painting. The following year, she and Constance Lane completed three large frescoes for a library at Ashridge in the Chilterns. Plans, with John and Paul Nash, for a cycle of frescoes for a c