Leonora Carrington

Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) was born in Lancashire, England. In 1937, a year after her mother gave her a book on surrealist art featuring Max Ernst’s work, she met the artist at a party. Not long after, Carrington and the then-married Ernst settled in the south of France, where Carrington completed her first major painting, The Inn of the Dawn Horse (Self-Portrait), in 1939. In the wake of Ernst’s imprisonment by the Nazis, Carrington fled to Spain. She eventually escaped to the Mexican embassy in Lisbon and settled first in New York and later in Mexico, moving in a circle of like-minded artists that included Remedios Varo and Alejandro Jodorowsky.