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Dora Carringtonbiographical notes — part one
The Slade at that time was a centre of what we would now call radical chic. She embraced the bohemian opportunity it offered - going to live in Gordon Square in Bloomsbury, and immediately becoming entangled in romantic liaisons with fellow painters Paul and John Nash, Christopher ('Chips') Nevinson, and Mark Gertler, who had a very strong influence on this first phase of her life as an artist. She also teamed up with fellow artists Dorothy Brett and Barbara Bagenal, and they started a new fashion at the school by cutting their hair into the shape of pudding-basins and wearing plain, deeply unfashionable clothes. They were called the 'crop heads'. She did well at the Slade, winning several prizes and moving quickly through the courses. Despite her bohemianism however, her style of painting and drawing was firmly traditional, and it fitted with the aesthetic of the Slade at that time. She was unaffected by the craze for Post-Impressionism which followed Roger Fry's famous 1910 exhibition at the Grafton Galleries which Virginia Woolf claimed changed human nature that year. Her personal life was dominated by the tempestuous relationship she conducted with Gertler and Nevinson which resulted in a form of unhappiness for all concerned. Although she behaved in a provocative manner, she refused to choose between them, or to have a sexual relationship with either of them.
Possessed of a remarkable personal fascination, she seemed to cast a spell on those around her. She figures in a number of novels, among them D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love (as Minette Darrington); Wyndham Lewis' The Apes of God (as Betty Blythe); Rosamund Lehmann's The Weather in the Streets (as Anna Corey); and Aldous Huxley's Chrome Yellow (as Mary Bracegirdle). However, Carrington's behaviour was viewed rather critically by another regular visitor to Garsington - D.H.Lawrence:
She was not well known as a painter during her lifetime as she painted only for her own pleasure, did not sign her works, and rarely exhibited them. She painted and made woodcuts for the Hogarth Press, which was founded by Leonard Woolf as a therapeutic exercise for his wife Virginia.
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Dora Carrington (1893-1932) was an artist and bohemian who loved and was loved by both men and women. She was born Dora de Houghton Carrington in Hereford, the daughter of a Liverpool merchant. As a somewhat wilful youngster, she found her family background quite stifling, adoring her father and loathing her mother. She attended Bedford High School, which emphasized sports, music, and drawing. The teachers encouraged her drawing and her parents paid for her to attend extra art classes in the afternoons. In 1910 she won a scholarship to the Slade School of Art in London and studied there with Henry Tonks.
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