Dora Carrington trained at the Slade School of Fine Art (1910–14), where she became recognised for her exquisite draftsmanship as well as her striking striking looks which combined short hair and an overtly androgynous way of dressing. She also preferred to be known just as ‘Carrington’. 

After a stormy relationship with Mark Gertler (1891–1939), she set up house with the homosexual writer Lytton Strachey and became part of the Bloomsbury Group. They were later joined by Ralph Partridge, whom she married in 1921. During this time, she provided illustrations for publications by the Hogarth Press, including Two Stories (1917). Left bereft after Strachey’s death in January 1932, she committed suicide in March that year. 

Carrington was little known as an artist during her lifetime, and since her early death attention has focused more on her romances than her art; however, her work was exhibited in 1970, at the Upper Grosvenor Galleries in London, and in 1978 at the Christ Church Picture Gallery in Oxford, and she was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery in 1995.

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