Beyond Bloomsbury: The magnetism of Dora Carrington

It was while Dora Carrington was staying with Virginia and Leonard Woolf at their country home in Beddingham near Lewes that the unsolicited kiss took place. While the group – all members of the intellectual Bloomsbury Set – walked Sussex’s beautiful South Downs, the artist was seized upon by the writer and critic Lytton Strachey, who, pressing his thick red beard to her face, attempted to kiss her.

Outraged and rather repulsed by this liberty taken by a man some 13 years her senior, ‘Carrington’, as she preferred to be known, resolved to sneak into his room that night and cut off the offending beard with scissors. But Strachey awoke just in time and an unlikely affection ignited between them that would become one of art history’s most tender and enduring love stories, even though Strachey was a homosexual, and Carrington was, in all probability, a lesbian.

The couple would set up home together in 1917, unable to forge a successful sexual relationship but forming an inseparable meeting of minds that outlived their other polyamorous entanglements and only ended when cancer claimed Strachey in January 1932 and Carrington, wracked by grief, shot herself seven weeks later.

Farm at Watendlath 1921 Dora Carrington 1893-1932 Presented by Noel Carrington, the artist's brother 1987. Tate For years, the story of Carrington’s short life has been examined almost exclusively in the context of the bohemian Bloomsbury Set who commissioned her work, entertained her at their country houses, and struck out with her on the South Downs on that eventful day in 1915. But a new exhibition, Dora Carrington: Beyond Bloomsbury, opening at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, on 9 November adopts an alternative approach, recognising how this nonconformist and often overlooked artist lived by her own rules, and examining the consequences of this on her creative output and her relationships.

The show is the first major exhibition of Carrington’s work since 1995, when the award-winning film Carrington, starring Emma Thompson, premiered. It draws on film footage, photographs and her charming letters illustrated with hand-drawn cartoons, and features over 100 works by the artist and her peers, ranging from her famous oil painting of Strachey to her intricate ‘tinsel pictures’ made from foil and glass.

‘We felt that there was much more to her and that we needed to look outside or beyond Bloomsbury to get a real sense of who she was and what she achieved,’ says co-curator Anne Chisholm, the editor of Carrington's Letters: Her Art, Her Loves, Her Friendships. In fact, it’s the things that make her distinct from the Bloomsbury crowd that help us fully appreciate her, says Chisholm. While the Bloomsbury artists looked to Europe, and above all Cézanne, her painting style, ‘was much more in the English tradition’, she says, and she enjoyed English crafts such as tile design and painting inn signs.

Carrington, Dora; Female Figure Standing; UCL Art Museum The free-thinking Carrington also did not share their upper-middle-class upbringing and, in an act of rebellion while at the elitist Slade School of Fine Art, had cropped her hair into a short mop with a thick blunt fringe. ‘She came from a different background. She made her way entirely through talent and originality,’ says Chisholm. Socially and educationally ‘she was not quite in their league’, she adds, noting that ‘one of the charms of Lytton Strachey for her was that he taught her about literature’.

Her rather frumpy, boyish appearance did not deter male suitors, who found her intriguing and were drawn to her warm and engaging manner. The painter Mark Gertler, for example, courted her indefatigably, dismissing her baffling devotion to the skinny bespectacled Strachey, who, to add to the confusion, wanted Gertler for himself. ‘To be in your beautiful presence is to feel uplifted and stimulated the whole time,’ Gertler wrote to Carrington in 1919. ‘Whenever I am with you I feel the same as I do in front of a real work of art.’ She slept with him begrudgingly but refused to commit.

When that relationship had run its course, both Carrington and Strachey transferred their affections to the athletic Ralph Partridge, an army major who soon fell under Carrington’s spell. He became a regular at their home in Tidmarsh, Berkshire, where his brawn and youth – in stark contrast to the wiry Strachey, who preferred a book and a blanket – was put to good use in the garden. To ensure the continuation of the happy ménage, Carrington reluctantly married Partridge in 1921 but wrote to Strachey in desperation the day before lamenting the ‘savage cynical fate which had made it impossible for my love ever to be used by you’.

One of Dora's illustrated letters - this one is Cat and Nude to John Poppet, 1928, Dora Carrington Collection, Harry Ransom Centre Carrington’s disdain for monogamy and outright fear of ever becoming a mother meant that her numerous dalliances with – often married – men only brought her back to Strachey, who represented no risk of either. ‘Her effect on men was spectacular and led to these complicated and unhappy relationships, partly because of her own sexual nature, and partly because the only man she really loved was Lytton Strachey and everything was secondary to him,’ says Chisholm.

Women were also dazzled by Carrington. ‘She is such a bustling eager creature, so red & solid, & at the same time inquisitive, that one can’t help liking her,’ wrote Virginia Woolf in her diary. Julia Strachey, Lytton’s niece, described her as ‘so glowing with sympathetic magnetism and droll ideas for them all that there wasn’t a person of her vast acquaintance who did not get the impression that she was their very best friend.’ Julia Strachey and Carrington enjoyed a flirtatious relationship, but it was with the charismatic American socialite Henrietta Bingham that Carrington would finally find physical satisfaction. An erotic drawing she made of Bingham, nude in high heels and hand on hip, is evidence of the heiress’s profound effect on her and goes some way in explaining her disinterest in consummating her male relationships.

Carrington poured her idiosyncratic energy into everything she did, whether enlivening a party hosted by Lady Ottoline Morrell by clambering atop a statue without a stitch on, or patiently beautifying the homes she shared with Strachey at Tidmarsh Mill, and later at Ham Spray House in Wiltshire, with decorative tiles, murals and hand-painted furniture. ‘The notion that she was this deeply tragic figure who nurtured a hopeless passion for a gay man and eventually killed herself, that is, of course, one side of the story,’ says Chisholm. ‘But actually, she was loved because she was great fun and totally original and made wonderful homes for people to visit.’

One of Dora's illustrated letters - this one is Cat and Nude to John Poppet, 1928, Dora Carrington Collection, Harry Ransom Centre Though in possession of an extraordinary talent, and a major prize-winner during her time at Slade, Carrington tended not to sign her works, rarely exhibited them, and destroyed a great many, disliking the scrutiny of public attention. The pieces that remain tell a story of fondness and personal connection: woodcut plates created for friends’ books, painted tiles for their homes, and portraits that conveyed her love for those close to her. One subject appears time and time again, seated in his library, warming his feet by the fire and almost always absorbed in a book – stroke by stroke of his once-maligned beard etched lovingly in wood or painted painstakingly with the tip of a brush. Here was someone who supported her career, inspired her creativity and didn’t try to mould her as a wife or mother. 'He was everything to me,’ she wrote in the weeks following Strachey’s death. ‘He never expected me to be anything different to what I was'.