In 1936, a nineteen-year-old woman from Lancashire walked into the New Burlington Galleries in London and saw the International Surrealist Exhibition for the first time. She left with her entire future rewritten. Within a year, she had abandoned her family’s expectations, eloped with an artist more than twice her age, and begun making paintings that would eventually sell for tens of millions. Her name was Leonora Carrington, and she spent the better part of a century refusing to do what she was told.

Expelled, Disowned, Unstoppable

Carrington was born in 1917 in Clayton Green, Lancashire, to a wealthy textile magnate father and an Irish mother whose bedtime stories were full of Celtic myth and fairy lore. From the start, she was a problem child — at least by the standards of the English upper class. She was expelled from two private schools. One reportedly let her go because she insisted on writing backwards with her left hand. The convent schools and finishing schools that followed fared no better. She had no interest in becoming a debutante, no patience for society functions, and a head full of Lewis Carroll, Beatrix Potter, and the strange creatures that populated her mother’s Irish folk tales.

Her father, Harold Carrington, wanted her presented at court. She wanted to paint. As a compromise of sorts, she was allowed to attend the Amédée Ozenfant Academy in London, where she studied art — though she later described her formal training as “paltry.” The real education came when she attended that Surrealist exhibition and found herself transfixed by a painting called Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale by Max Ernst. She met Ernst himself shortly after, at a dinner party. He was forty-six. She was twenty. Her family was horrified. She didn’t care.

They ran off to Paris together, then to a farmhouse in Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche in the south of France. It was here, in a crumbling stone house decorated with sculptures and murals they made together, that Carrington truly began to develop her artistic voice. She painted, she wrote, she cooked elaborate meals, and she kept company with the leading Surrealists of the day — Breton, Picasso, Dalí, Miró. But she never fell in line with them.

“I Didn’t Have Time to Be Anyone’s Muse”

The male Surrealists loved the idea of the woman as muse — passive, mysterious, sexually available, waiting to be decoded by the male genius. Carrington had a one-word response to this: “Bullshit.” When Joan Miró once told her to go and fetch his cigarettes, she told him he could bloody well get them himself. When asked years later about her role as Ernst’s muse, she was characteristically blunt: “I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse. I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist.”

She never read André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto either. “I didn’t want anyone else to tell me what to do or what to think,” she explained. While the male Surrealists drew heavily on Freudian psychoanalysis — all that business about repressed desires and the unconscious — Carrington built her own symbolic language from autobiography, Celtic mythology, alchemy, Kabbalah, and the kind of folk magic her nanny had whispered to her as a child. Her canvases were populated with white horses (a recurring self-portrait motif), egg-shaped goddesses, solemn children, menacing minotaurs, and hybrid creatures that seemed to have wandered out of a medieval bestiary and into a fever dream.

The Darkness in Spain

The idyll in southern France collapsed in 1939 when war broke out. Ernst, a German national, was arrested by the French authorities as an enemy alien. Carrington, left alone and increasingly unstable, suffered a devastating mental breakdown. She fled to Spain, where her behaviour became increasingly erratic — she became convinced that Madrid was the centre of the world and that she could cure the city’s ills through her own suffering. Her father, alerted by the British consulate, had her committed to a psychiatric hospital in Santander.

What happened there was brutal. She was given the drug Cardiazol, which induced violent seizures — a common “treatment” at the time. She was restrained, humiliated, and stripped of her autonomy. She later wrote about the experience in Down Below, a harrowing memoir published in 1944 that remains one of the most vivid first-person accounts of institutionalisation ever written. It’s unflinching and strange and reads like Surrealism applied to genuine horror — because, in a sense, that’s exactly what it is.

Her family arranged for her to be transferred to a sanatorium in Lisbon, but Carrington escaped. She made her way to the Mexican embassy, where she married a Mexican diplomat named Renato Leduc — a marriage of convenience that got her a visa and a passage out of Europe. By 1942, she was in Mexico City.

A Second Life in Mexico

Mexico saved Leonora Carrington. Or perhaps she saved herself, and Mexico simply gave her the room to do it. Either way, the country became her home for the remaining seven decades of her life, and it was there that she produced the vast majority of her work.

She divorced Leduc and married the Hungarian photographer Emerico “Chiki” Weisz, with whom she had two sons — Gabriel, who became a poet, and Pablo, who became a Surrealist painter. She immersed herself in Mexican culture, studying Mayan texts like the Popol Vuh, exploring indigenous mythology, and developing a deep interest in traditional Mexican cooking, which she saw as a form of alchemy — the transformation of raw ingredients into something nourishing and mysterious. She even co-authored a cookbook, though calling it that undersells the strangeness of the recipes within.

Her painting flourished. Works like Green Tea (1942), And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur (1953), and Oink (They Shall Behold Thine Eyes) (1959) are dense, meticulously rendered compositions that reward long looking. They borrow from Hieronymus Bosch’s teeming, nightmarish detail but filter it through Carrington’s own cosmology — a world where the domestic and the divine, the animal and the human, the comic and the terrifying all coexist without apology.

She also sculpted, designed theatre sets, wrote novels and short stories, and in the 1970s contributed to a Mexican horror film. During the 1960s, she became active in Mexico’s women’s liberation movement, designing a poster that depicted women breaking free from domestic servitude — years before such imagery became commonplace in feminist art.

The Long Overlooking

Despite all of this — the eight decades of prolific output, the writing, the sculpture, the activism — Carrington remained stubbornly under-recognised for most of her life. Art history textbooks, when they mentioned her at all, tended to file her under “Max Ernst’s girlfriend.” The Surrealist canon was built by men, and the women who shaped the movement — Carrington, Remedios Varo, Dorothea Tanning, Lee Miller — were pushed to the margins.

Recognition came late but eventually arrived in force. In 2005, Christie’s sold one of her paintings for $713,000, a record at the time for a living Surrealist. In May 2024, her painting Les Distractions de Dagobert sold at Sotheby’s in New York for $28.5 million — a record for a British-born female artist. The Tate staged a major retrospective. The Museo Leonora Carrington opened two venues in Mexico, housing her art and personal belongings. A set of previously unknown tarot card illustrations she’d made was published in 2021, introducing yet another generation to her vision.

Carrington died in Mexico City in 2011, at the age of ninety-four. She had been making art right up until the end. When asked late in life to sum up what she knew, she offered: “The only thing I know is that I don’t know.” It’s a fitting epitaph for someone who spent nine decades exploring the unknown — and who never once let anyone else define what she found there.