Carline Nancy began her studies in 1910, Carrington won prizes including the Slade Scholarship. Her work is in the collection of University College London. Fellow students who became her friends included Dorothy Brett, Alix Sargent Florence daughter of the artist, Mary Paul Nash, and Mark Gertler. During her studentship Carrington developed her distinctive personal style, transforming herself from an Edwardian lady to a figure with bobbed hair, sometimes dressed in breeches. She dropped her first name to signal her new identity.
Carrington has been the subject of a feature film and a biography focusing on her relationships with Bloomsbury Group figures such as Lytton Strachey (whom she lived with from 1917) and Virginia Woolf. Carrington's artistic allegiance lay not with the Bloomsbury painters but with the artists of Chelsea, and her own collection contained works by Augustus John, Mark Gertler and John Nash, t h a t she had exchanged with them, like theirs, Carrington's art is figurative, polished and precise, but also suggests an intensely personal vision. This was partly because she painted the people and places she knew and was also a result, of her manipulation of scale and space. She exhibited in London at the New English Art Club, the London Group and the Grosvenor Galleries.
Among Carrington's portraits, best known are perhaps the images of Lytton Strachey, such as a painting in which he peers through his spectacles at a book 1916, private collection.Aside from her paintings of her companion, Carrington's finest portraits are of women of character Her painting of Lady Strachey 1920,is in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
Carrington was also a painter of places. Her earliest landscapes were painted at Hurstboume Tarrant, where her family lived. Later she portrayed her surroundings at her homes in Tidmarsh Mill, Berkshire, and then at Hamspray, Wiltshire, and painted on her travels in France and Spain in the 1920s. Her work was included in the exhibition Landscape in Britain 1850-1950 (Hayward Gallery 1983}, and can be
understood as part of the wider cultural celebration of traditional rural life that took place in response to the First World War.
The decorative art that had been an important part of her work from her student days continued to occupy Carrington. In 1913 she painted a fresco in the Library of Ashridge House, Hertfordshire, with another woman student, perhaps inspired by the teaching of Mary Sargent Florence, who had lectured on fresco and tempera painting at the Slade. Carrington designed for the Omega Workshops and created decorative schemes for interiors, tiles and furniture, including, in 1927, a gramophone cabinet Portsmouth City Museum and Art Gallery. She painted pub signs, and works on glass and silver paper, and made woodcuts and drawings to illustrate books published by the Omega Workshops, the Hogarth Press, and for an edition of Don Quixote published by Oxford University Press in 1922. Carrington's last completed work, made in 1931, was a window at Biddesden house,from which a cook in eighteenth century dress gazes out at the people passing by. |
