Carrington, Dora (de Houghton) (1893-1932)

English painter, a member of the Bloomsbury Group. She developed a style which, in its emphasis on design and bold colours, is typical of English post-Impressionism of the period from World War I to the 1930s. Among her best-known works are an elegant portrait of her close friend, the writer Lytton Strachey (1918), and the landscape The Mill House at Tidmarsh (1918).

Her style, broadly similar to that of her Bloomsbury friends Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, was well suited to the decorative arts, and her work includes sign boards, painted tiles and furniture, and designs for book covers; from around 1914 she worked for several years for Roger Fry's Omega Workshop.

Carrington was born in Hereford, and studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, London 1910-14 - then one of the most avant-garde art schools in England - where she came into contact with artists such as Mark Gertler, who had a marked impact on her development, Paul Nash, and Stanley Spencer. In 1915 she met Lytton Strachey, with whom she lived from 1916, even after her marriage to Ralph Partridge in 1921. She killed herself in 1932 shortly after Strachey died of cancer.