Leonora Carrington, St. Martin d'Ardèche, France, 1939

Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) was an English-born surrealist known for her fantastical paintings and writings that fuse the mundane and magical, animals and humans. She met Max Ernst, the German Dada and surrealist artist, in 1937 at a dinner party in London. They eloped to Paris a few months later and in 1938 they moved to an eighteenth-century farmhouse in the village of Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche in the south of France, which became a focal point for the couple’s creative collaborations.

This photograph was taken by the American photographer Lee Miller (1907–1977) while she was staying at the house with her partner, Roland Penrose. The idyll came to an end, though, when Ernst was imprisoned by the Vichy government as an ‘enemy alien’ shortly after the Second World War broke out. Carrington fled to Spain, where she suffered a breakdown and endured horrific conditions in a sanatorium. Although the pair met again by chance in a Lisbon market in May 1941, they never rekindled their relationship.

National Portrait Gallery, London. Purchased, 2004
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