‘Lytton Strachey’ Print by Dora Carrington

Dora Carrington’s association with the Bloomsbury Group, a set of twentieth-century English writers, intellectuals, and artists, including Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, and E. M. Forster, has largely eclipsed her artistic career. In particular, it was Carrington’s complicated relationship with one of group’s members, the writer and critic Lytton Strachey that has become of specific interest, resulting in the 1995 film ‘Carrington’, directed by Christopher Hampton.   Carrington painted this portrait of Lytton Strachey during the First World War, when he was a conscientious objector.  The unlikely couple lived together in Sussex from 1917 until Strachey’s death in 1931. During this period Carrington produced several intimate portraits of Strachey, his family and friends.