Dora Carrington

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, Christopher 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 1912, 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 church in Uxbridge came to nothing with the start of World War I. After graduating from the Slade, although short of money, Carrington stayed in London, living in Soho with a studio in Chelsea. Her paintings were included in a number of group exhibitions, including with the New English Art Club, and she stopped signing and dating her work. In 1914 Carrington's parents moved to Ibthorpe House in the village of Hurstbourne Tarrant in Hampshire and shortly afterwards she moved there and set up her studio in a outbuilding of the property.

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

In June 1918, Virginia Woolf wrote of Carrington in her diary: "She is odd from her mixture of impulse & self consciousness. I wonder sometimes what she’s at: so eager to please, conciliatory, restless, & active.... [B]ut she is such a bustling eager creature, so red & solid, & at the same time inquisitive, that one can’t help liking her." Carrington first set up house 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 also 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, Ralph 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 began an affair with him. The affair energized Carrington's artistic creativity, and she also collaborated with Penrose on the making of three films. However, Penrose wanted Carrington exclusively for himself, a commitment she refused to make because of her love for Strachey. The affair, her last with a man, ended when Carrington became pregnant and had an abortion.

Dora Carrington killed herself on 11 March 1932, two months after Strachey's death, using a gun borrowed from her friend, Hon. Bryan Guinness (later 2nd Baron Moyne). Her body was cremated and the ashes buried under the laurels in the garden of Ham Spray House.

An accomplished painter of both portraits and landscape, she also worked in applied and decorative arts, painting on any type of surface she had at hand including inn signs, tiles and furniture. She also decorated pottery and designed the library at Ham Spray. In 1970 David Garnett published a selection of letters and extracts from her diary, since which time critical and popular appreciation of her work has risen sharply. In 1978, Sir John Rothenstein, for nearly thirty years Director of the Tate Gallery, London, called Dora Carrington "the most neglected serious painter of her time." "That is no longer the case. In 1995 she was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery in London." Two of her works are in the Tate Gallery, London.