On Dora Carrington

The life​ and work of Dora Carrington have long been overshadowed by her death. As is often the way with suicides, later viewers find it hard to lose hindsight. For all the vivacity in many of her paintings, which seem to vibrate with joy in colour and form, she is often cast as a tragic figure. A less obvious factor in her relative obscurity is the obsessive cult of Bloomsbury. Lytton Strachey was the love of Carrington’s life; his death in 1932 was the reason she despaired, shooting herself some seven weeks later at the age of 38. She had been friendly or acquainted with other members of the group, including Roger Fry and Ottoline Morrell, but she never belonged to the inner circle of either Bloomsbury generation. Like her fellow painter and sometime lover Mark Gertler she worked ‘on the fringes of the Bloomsbury Group’, as the handout at Dora Carrington: Beyond Bloomsbury puts it. The Pallant House exhibition (until 27 April) and its accompanying catalogue succeed in moving Carrington out of the shade, not just ‘beyond Bloomsbury’ but more positively, if implicitly, onto higher ground.

The show makes a case for Carrington and Gertler as among the most important British artists of the interwar years. The best painters of the period were their friends and fellow alumni of the Slade: Paul and John Nash, C.R.W. Nevinson, Edward Wadsworth, William Roberts and David Bomberg. They were all influenced, directly or indirectly, by Fry’s Post-Impressionist exhibition of 1910, which introduced the British to Continental art, especially Cézanne, but they were able to develop their own work with an originality that weaker painters, such as Fry, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, were not. As far as art was concerned, Carrington was at the centre; Bloomsbury was the fringe.

Her generation – this ‘crisis of brilliance’, as the Slade’s inspiring and famously bad-tempered drawing master, Henry Tonks, called it – caught the moment when the academic rigour of the life class was beginning to be infused with stirrings of the new. Carrington entered the school in the year of Fry’s exhibition, around the same time as Gertler, Nevinson and the Nash brothers. She won a scholarship in 1912 and two awards for figure painting. One of her prize-winning pieces, Female Figure Standing (1913), is included in this exhibition. The model is seen from behind and there is more than mere correctness in the portrayal of her heavy hips and slender arms. There is a pleasure in the way the light plays on her back, resting delicately on the elaborate arrangement of her bright gold hair.

‘Farm at Watendlath’ (1921). Photo: Tate

The Slade was remarkable for its high proportion of female students – they outnumbered the men by four to one – and there was something of the finishing school about the place. Edwardian parents were no doubt reassured to know their daughters would be mixing with respectable young women including such ‘notable’ aristocratic beauties as the sisters Lady Violet and Lady Diana Manners, around whom a cloud of eligible beaux constantly buzzed. Carrington’s own family was not grand. Her father had been a civil engineer in India and married late when he retired to England. She blamed her mother, a former governess twenty years younger than her husband, for her ‘awful’ repressive childhood, but this did not prevent her from becoming something of a star at art school, remembered as ‘both clever and good-looking to an unusual degree … a conspicuous and popular figure’. All her life people fell in love with her.

Leaving the Slade in 1914, she made a scant living through the war years with woodcut illustrations, including commissions for Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press. Her brother, Teddy, was lost at the Somme and her father died in 1918, by which time she had been drawn into the Bloomsbury orbit, initially as a regular guest of Morrell at Garsington and then decisively in 1915 when she met and fell in love with Strachey. A brief experiment at sex was a failure – he preferred men – and there was no question of marriage, but theirs was a milieu accustomed to unconventional households and the two of them moved into Tidmarsh Mill House, near Pangbourne in Berkshire, in 1917. The rest of Carrington’s life was spent forming and dissolving the irregular triangles that enabled her and Strachey to remain together while pursuing lovers of their own.

There has been much huffing and puffing – not least in the catalogue essays by Simon Martin and Anne Chisholm – about Carrington’s sexuality. In her introduction, Ali Smith says simply that she was ‘unpindownable’, which seems right. She slept with men and women, describing herself as something between ‘a nymphomaniac and a wood nymph’, but her love for Strachey was not rooted in the physical. It came from her recognition of a quality in him which gave her absolute confidence in his ability to complete her. One of the most revealing things she said about herself, in a letter to Gerald Brenan in 1921, was that ‘the discovery of a person, of an affection, of a new emotion, is to me next to my painting, the greatest thing I care about.’

The truth of this can be seen in her portraits. They are uneven in quality and it’s hard not to feel that they reflect her attitude towards the sitters. E.M. Forster (1920), recognisable but lifeless, is a watery, unmemorable composition. Brenan, painted in 1921 when he and Carrington were on the brink of their affair, stares straight out with such smouldering intensity that looking at him feels like an intrusion into an intimate moment. Strachey’s niece Julia is a turbaned arrangement of Fragonard-like delicacy, while Lytton himself presented a particular challenge. Immensely tall, thin, bearded and bespectacled, he was an auto-caricature – difficult to depict without seeming to exaggerate. Lytton Strachey (1916) is deceptively simple. Shown in profile from the midriff up, he reclines at eye level with his book, its marbled edges picking up the red of the upholstery on one side and the auburn of his beard on the other. The ingenuity of the pose is that it allows us to see his eye behind the lens of his round glasses. Deep-set, it looks naked and vulnerable, as the eyes of habitual spectacle wearers do – a glimpse, perhaps, of the Strachey that Carrington saw. She was also a frequent self-portraitist. The most striking of the examples at Pallant House is a watercolour from 1913 in which she stands side-on, one arm braced against a door frame as she strides forwards in baggy blue trousers, red-heeled shoes and a striped shirt. Her corps cap is a Germanic touch which adds to the impression that, like Gertler, she was looking at Vienna and the Secessionists as well as Post-Impressionism.

‘Self-Portrait’ (1913). Image courtesy of Jerwood Collection.

Insofar as Carrington has had a wider reputation, it has rested chiefly on her landscapes. In 2014, Farm at Watendlath (1921) came second in a poll to find the most popular works in British museums. First place went to a Hockney, and Watendlath has something of his engaging air of domesticity, but with a slight eeriness. Two tiny white figures of a woman and a girl in Edwardian dress hold hands on a path in front of farm buildings. They are the focal point and yet, at the same time, seem anomalous, lost. Behind the house and beyond the trees, the hills are overbearing. The composition calls to mind Julia Strachey’s memory of Carrington’s elusiveness (‘an angular elf, turning her face from the daylight’) as well as her intriguing reference to ‘the envelope of deafening guilt’ that surrounded her. There is often a sliver of ice in even the warmest of Carrington’s paintings. Of the late landscape Downs from Ham Spray in Winter (1929-30), she wrote to Brenan: ‘The sky was a most delicate green tinged with pink and little clouds rose up from behind the crest of the downs, like balloons … The country intoxicates me … To my mind this landscape is at its loveliest in the winter, covered with snow.’

It was only, perhaps, in the applied arts that she completely lost self-consciousness. The tinsel pictures, made of foil pressed against glass, which she ran up to sell at Liberty, are a delight. They include Iris Tree on a Horse – looking like a 1920s Joan of Arc – and several larger still lifes. The exhibition gives the applied arts due weight; they are well discussed in the catalogue by Ariane Banks in her chapter on ‘Carrington at Home’ and the design of the show recreates some of the trompe l’oeil effects at which Carrington excelled. There is an illusionary bookcase made for Lytton, its titles cut and pasted from other volumes to create such suggestive chimeras as ‘Lord Alfred: a strange pet by Oscar Wilde’, and a false window for Biddesden House through which a Georgian housemaid peels an apple while a cat eyes a caged bird. Her ability to produce a perfect piece of decoration, no more or less than the situation required, like her tile designs and painted furniture, is another area in which the comparison with Bloomsbury is to Carrington’s advantage. Her work is sprightly beside the generally lumpen output of Fry’s Omega Workshops, to which she briefly contributed. Her home-making activities at Tidmarsh and later at Ham Spray were part of her quest to retain Strachey in a cat’s cradle of intersecting relationships. This included a half-hearted marriage to Ralph Partridge (who loved Carrington and was loved by Strachey), which only briefly achieved the hoped-for ‘triangular trinity of happiness’.

A further complication was Strachey’s growing fame in the 1920s. Eminent Victorians made him a sought-after guest among hostesses who would ‘no more have thought of including Carrington than … his housekeeper or his cook’. Strachey seems not to have demurred. The unconventionality of Bloomsbury never went very far where class was concerned, and Carrington was perhaps made to feel her middle-class status. A rare and reluctant exhibitor, known to turn her own pictures to the wall when visitors called, she seems not to have been encouraged by her peers. She did submit a still life to Fry’s ‘Nameless’ exhibition of anonymous works, but there is an unmistakable snobbery in Bell’s inquiry as to whether Fry had ‘let in anything by Carrington’. The pictures she submitted under her own name to the London Group in 1920 were all rejected.

Strachey suggested that Bell and Grant were ‘not quite perfect critics’. Carrington concluded that she would never fit in, that they found her work ‘finickery’. At this distance in time, it seems more likely they were jealous. The Slade gave Carrington a facility for creative imitation, for catching the essence of an admired artist and absorbing it. Her Portrait of Annie (1925), the housemaid at Tidmarsh, is consciously in the manner of Renoir, but with a monumental stillness of its own. The loving attention given to one curling apron strap might have come from a Stanley Spencer. Carrington’s ailing father under his bright red rug is a companion to Van Gogh’s portraits of his neighbours in Arles.

By 1930, the roundabout of relationships began to slow. Partridge settled into a permanent relationship with Frances Marshall; Gertler, who had been in love with Carrington for years, married at last. Strachey’s health was failing. When he died, Gertler wrote to her in condolence and reflected on the ‘painful time’ they had been through together. ‘But we were both very young and probably unsuited. And it is over now and nobody’s fault.’ Her suicide a few weeks later horrified him and may have contributed to his own in 1939. In the exhibition, tantalising short pieces of film, including what is thought to be the only footage of Strachey, waving excitedly from a window, evoke something of the vitality of Carrington’s heyday. One shows her on her pony, Belle, riding fast and confidently. It illustrates what Smith characterises as her particular quality: a ‘swanky cantering charm’.