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SURREALISM · WORK

Self-Portrait

Leonora Carrington · 1938

A 20-year-old woman paints herself in riding clothes in a locked dream-room, hand out to a lactating hyena, a rocking-horse floating on the wall and a real horse galloping free out the window: a female Surrealist as the dreamer, not the dreamed-of muse.

The canvas
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Leonora Carrington, Self-Portrait, 1938. Oil on canvas. 2 ft 1 9/16 in × 2 ft 8 in.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Pierre and Maria-Gaetana Matisse Collection, 2002 (2002.456.1)
Look closer
Find these on the canvas above
  1. The spotted hyena, facing her
    Lower center, between Carrington and the viewer, turned toward her
    A striped, spotted hyena stands in front of the chair, its head turned up toward Carrington and mirroring her outstretched hand. Look at two things: its eyes, which are unsettlingly human, and the row of heavy, pendulous teats along its belly, which read as engorged or lactating. Scholars read this female hyena as Carrington’s self-surrogate, the wild, sexually-ambiguous animal she chose to stand for herself (the same creature stars in her story The Debutante of these years, where a hyena takes a young woman’s place at a society ball). That reading is interpretation, well attested and reasonable, not a meaning Carrington stated about this canvas.
  2. The white rocking-horse, floating on the wall
    Behind and above her head, hung against the back wall
    A pale rocking-horse, a child’s toy, hangs weightless on the wall behind her, with no rockers touching any floor. It floats. Scholars tie it to childhood and to Carrington’s own play Pénélope, about a girl in love with a rocking horse. Whatever it points to, on the canvas it simply hovers, the first sign that this room obeys dream-rules and not gravity.
  3. The white horse galloping outside
    Through the parted curtain at the right, out in the open landscape
    Past a curtained window, set deliberately outside the enclosed room, a white horse runs free across a green landscape. It rhymes with the still rocking-horse indoors, the captive toy and the loose animal, and is widely read as Carrington’s image of liberty and escape, placed pointedly beyond the walls she has painted herself inside of.
  4. Carrington in riding clothes
    The seated central figure, dressed in pale jodhpurs and jacket
    She wears white jodhpurs (close-fitting riding breeches) and a jacket: androgynous riding dress, not the eroticized female nude that fills so much Surrealist painting. The choice is the argument. She presents herself as a rider, poised to move, clothed in her own terms rather than arranged as an object of desire.
  5. Her wild dark hair
    Framing her face, loose and untamed
    A loose, untamed mane of dark hair springs out around her head and visually rhymes with the coats of the animals around her. The human figure and her bestiary are braided together by the paint itself, her hair answering the hyena’s bristle and the horses’ manes.
  6. The blue chair
    The seat beneath her, near the corner of the room
    She perches on the very front edge of a blue armchair rather than settling back into it, knees together, body tipped forward and alert. It is a domestic seat in a domestic room, and she sits in it like someone about to stand up and leave. The unease is the point: this is an interior she looks ready to walk out of.
The story · 5 chapters
~18 min total
1
London → Paris · 1937–38
A runaway debutante picks up a brush
At about twenty, a rebellious daughter of a wealthy Lancashire textile family has just walked out of that life, met the Surrealist painter Max Ernst, and crossed to France. She begins this canvas in London and finishes it in Paris, a participant in Surrealism from the start, not a bystander.
2
The making
A dream-room, furnished from her own head
Not a record of a real room. Carrington builds an enclosed interior and fills it with a private bestiary, the same creatures that walk through her stories of these years, painted with a flat, exact, storybook clarity that asks you to believe it.
3
The canvas
What is in the room
Carrington on the edge of a blue chair in white riding clothes, wild dark hair, one hand reaching toward a spotted hyena with heavy teats and human eyes; a white rocking-horse floating on the wall behind her, and through the curtain a white horse galloping free.
4
The break
The dreamer, not the dream
In most Surrealism the woman is the object, the muse, the dreamed-of body men paint. Here a young woman Surrealist paints her own dream-symbolism and her own animal-kin self, in androgynous clothes, staring back: the seer, not the seen.
5
After
The escape it predicted came true
War broke, Ernst was interned, Carrington fled to Spain and a breakdown, then reached Mexico in 1942 to become a central figure of its Surrealism. The canvas she left behind travelled to New York with Ernst and ended, in 2002, at the Met.
c.1937–38
Painted
2′1⁹⁄₁₆″ × 2′8″
Dimensions
The Met
Now at
Provenance
Every hand it passed through
c.1938–1941
Leonora Carrington, then Max Ernst
France
Carrington left the painting with Ernst in France at the outbreak of the Second World War, when she fled the country.
1941
Max Ernst
New York
Ernst carried the canvas to New York when he emigrated to the United States in 1941.
after 1942
Pierre Matisse (dealer)
New York
Ernst gave it to the art dealer Pierre Matisse (youngest son of Henri Matisse), reportedly after December 1942.
1989
Maria-Gaetana Matisse
New York
Passed to his widow, Maria-Gaetana (Tana) Matisse, on Pierre Matisse’s death in 1989.
2002–today
The Metropolitan Museum of ArtMuseum
New York
Given by the Pierre and Maria-Gaetana Matisse Foundation. Credit line: The Pierre and Maria-Gaetana Matisse Collection, 2002. Accession 2002.456.1. On view in the Modern wing.