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Dora de Houghton Carrington
(29 March 1893 - 11 March 1932) U.K.

Dora Carrington

Painter

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Dora de Houghton Carrington, the daughter of a Liverpool merchant, was born in Hereford, England, and attended the all-girls' Bedford High School which emphasized art. Her parents also paid for her to receive extra lessons in drawing. She went to the Slade School of Art at University College, London where she subsequently won a scholarship.

Dora 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 his first novel Crome Yellow, Aldous Huxley based the character of Mary Bracegirdle on Carrington, and described how she and he slept on the roof of "Lollipop Hall", based on Lady Ottoline Morrell's home. He chose the name "Bracegirdle" because of Dora's chastity.

Dora CarringtonDora first set up house with Lytton Strachey in November 1917, when they moved together to Tidmarsh Mill House, near Pangbourne, Berkshire. Dora met Ralph Partridge, an Oxford friend of her younger brother Noel, in 1918. Partridge fell in love with Dora and eventually, in 1921, she agreed to marry him, not for love but to hold the menage a 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 Dora was effectively over, but he continued to visit her most weekends. In 1928 Dora met Bernard "Beakus" Penrose, a friend of Partridge's and the younger brother of the artist Roland Penrose, and began an affair with him. The affair energized Dora's artistic creativity, and she also collaborated with Penrose on the making of three films. However, Penrose wanted Dora exclusively for himself, a commitment she refused to make because of her love for Strachey. The affair, her last with a man, ended when Dora became pregnant and had an abortion.

Lytton Strachey died of stomach cancer at Ham Spray in January 1932. Dora, who saw no purpose in a life without Strachey, committed suicide two months after his death by shooting herself with a gun borrowed from a friend. 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."

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Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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