Dora Carrington valuation
Bloomsbury painter of portraits and landscapes who rarely exhibited and never signed, known simply as Carrington.
Dora Carrington was born in Hereford in 1893 and studied at the Slade from 1910, where she won a scholarship and prizes and her fellow students included Paul Nash, C. R. W. Nevinson and Mark Gertler, who pursued her for years.
What a work by Dora Carrington is worth
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Bio
Dora Carrington was born in Hereford in 1893 and studied at the Slade from 1910, where she won a scholarship and prizes and her fellow students included Paul Nash, C. R. W. Nevinson and Mark Gertler, who pursued her for years. She dropped her first name as a student and was known simply as Carrington. In 1917 she began living with the writer Lytton Strachey, first at Tidmarsh Mill near Pangbourne and from 1924 at Ham Spray House in Wiltshire, with Ralph Partridge, whom she married in 1921. She painted portraits, landscapes and still lifes with a sharp, decorative clarity, worked for the Omega Workshops and designed woodcuts for the Hogarth Press. She rarely exhibited and did not sign her work. She died at Ham Spray in March 1932, seven weeks after Strachey.
Because she rarely exhibited and did not sign, attribution depends on provenance, usually through her family, friends or the Strachey and Partridge circle, and on comparison with documented works. Paintings are scarce; drawings, woodcuts and decorated objects appear more often.
The Slade, Tidmarsh and Ham Spray
In 1978 Sir John Rothenstein, for nearly thirty years director of the Tate, called her the most neglected serious painter of her time. The Barbican held a retrospective in 1995.
Pallant House Gallery in Chichester held another retrospective in 2024 and 2025, and two of her works are in Tate's collection.
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