Dora de Houghton Carrington (29 March 1893 – 11 March 1932), known generally as Carrington, was an English painter and decorative artist, remembered in part for her association with members of the Bloomsbury Group, especially the writer Lytton Strachey. From her time as an art student, she was known simply by her surname as she considered Dora to be "vulgar and sentimental". She was not well known as a painter during her lifetime, as she rarely exhibited and did not sign her work. She worked for a while at the Omega Workshops, and for the Hogarth Press, designing woodcuts. Early life Carrington was born in Hereford, England, to railway engineer Samuel Carrington, who worked for the East India Company, and Charlotte (née Houghton). They had married in 1888 and had five children together of whom Dora was their fourth. She attended the all-girls' Bedford High School which emphasized art, and her parents paid for her to receive extra lessons in drawing. She won a number of awards in the national school competitions organised by the Royal Drawing Society. In 1910, she went to the Slade School of Art in central London where she subsequently won a scholarship and several other prizes; her fellow students included Dorothy Brett, Paul Nash, Christopher R. W. Nevinson and Mark Gertler. All at one time or another were in love with her, as was Nash's younger brother John Nash, who hoped to marry her. Gertler pursued Carrington for a number of years, and they had a brief sexual relationship during the years of the First World War. During 1912, Carrington attended a series of lectures by Mary Sargant Florence on fresco painting. The following year, she and Constance Lane completed three large frescoes for a library at Ashridge in the Chilterns. Plans, with John and Paul Nash, for a cycle of frescoes for a church in Uxbridge near London came to nothing with the start of the War. After graduating from the Slade, although short of money, Carrington stayed in London, living in Soho with a studio in Chelsea. Her paintings were included in a number of group exhibitions, including with the New English Art Club, and she stopped signing and dating her work. In 1914 Carrington's parents moved to Ibthorpe House in the village of Hurstbourne Tarrant in Hampshire, and shortly afterwards she moved there and set up her studio in an outbuilding. Career