Dora Carrington was the fourth of five children. Her parents were Samuel Carrington, a railroad engineer, and his wife Charlotte Houghton. Her earliest days were spent in Hereford, not far east of Wales. Carrington later recalled that she had a terrible childhood. Her mother was anxious, demanding and extremely pious, devoting much of her time to religious concerns. Outside her family, at Bedford High School, Carrington received personal attention that nurtured her creativity. Her teachers quickly recognized her artistic talent. While still a young student, she twice won national awards for drawing at the tender ages of 12 and 13. Dora Carrington studied at the Slade School of Art, part of University College in London. Despite her daring fashion and turbulent romances, Dora Carrington's artistic development during this period was rather dull. She learned and worked in very traditional styles. After completing her education at Slade, Carrington worked on making paintings and woodcuts for the Omega Workshops and the Hogarth Press, both creative enterprises founded by members of London's bohemian Bloomsbury Group. When her father died, he left her a small inheritance that allowed her greater financial and artistic independence. She divided her time between fulfilling the housework of a wife and that of an artist. She painted on almost any medium she could find, including glass, signs, tile, and the walls of her friends' homes.
Carrington was immortalized in print by D.H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley, but she never achieved fame as an artist during her lifetime. This can be attributed to the fact that she rarely exhibited or even signed her work, along with the fact that she did not work in the most current styles. For many years, her art was associated with the Bloomsbury Group due to her many romantic entanglements within that group. Yet she was not interested in the formal experimentation of modernism to the same degree as some of the most famous members of the group, including Roger Fry and Virginia Woolf. In fact, she is celebrated today for her many portraits and landscapes that defy easy classification and lie somewhere on the borders of the Impressionist, Pre-Raphaelite, and Surrealist movements. She is also celebrated for her attention to decorative art as well as female interests, from her focus on women in her landscapes to her interest in the female realm of decorative art. When David Garnett published a selection of her letters and a selection from her diary, Carrington's painting gained a new academic and popular following. Since then, her work has been acquired by Tate Britain and has also been the subject of a major Barbican retrospective. Her intimate portraits of those closest to her influenced an eclectic group of artists, particularly portrait painters in Britain and the United States , including Alice Neel, Tracey Emin, and Tom Phillips.
Dora Carrington was the fourth of five children. Her parents were Samuel Carrington, a railroad engineer, and his wife Charlotte Houghton. Her earliest days were spent in Hereford, not far east of Wales. Carrington later recalled that she had a terrible childhood. Her mother was anxious, demanding and extremely pious, devoting much of her time to religious concerns. Outside her family, at Bedford High School, Carrington received personal attention that nurtured her creativity. Her teachers quickly recognized her artistic talent. While still a young student, she twice won national awards for drawing at the tender ages of 12 and 13. Dora Carrington studied at the Slade School of Art, part of University College in London. Despite her daring fashion and turbulent romances, Dora Carrington's artistic development during this period was rather dull. She learned and worked in very traditional styles. After completing her education at Slade, Carrington worked on making paintings and woodcuts for the Omega Workshops and the Hogarth Press, both creative enterprises founded by members of London's bohemian Bloomsbury Group. When her father died, he left her a small inheritance that allowed her greater financial and artistic independence. She divided her time between fulfilling the housework of a wife and that of an artist. She painted on almost any medium she could find, including glass, signs, tile, and the walls of her friends' homes.
Carrington was immortalized in print by D.H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley, but she never achieved fame as an artist during her lifetime. This can be attributed to the fact that she rarely exhibited or even signed her work, along with the fact that she did not work in the most current styles. For many years, her art was associated with the Bloomsbury Group due to her many romantic entanglements within that group. Yet she was not interested in the formal experimentation of modernism to the same degree as some of the most famous members of the group, including Roger Fry and Virginia Woolf. In fact, she is celebrated today for her many portraits and landscapes that defy easy classification and lie somewhere on the borders of the Impressionist, Pre-Raphaelite, and Surrealist movements. She is also celebrated for her attention to decorative art as well as female interests, from her focus on women in her landscapes to her interest in the female realm of decorative art. When David Garnett published a selection of her letters and a selection from her diary, Carrington's painting gained a new academic and popular following. Since then, her work has been acquired by Tate Britain and has also been the subject of a major Barbican retrospective. Her intimate portraits of those closest to her influenced an eclectic group of artists, particularly portrait painters in Britain and the United States , including Alice Neel, Tracey Emin, and Tom Phillips.
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