The escape it predicted came true

The sharpest gloss on this painting is a line Carrington said long after she painted it, when the art historian Whitney Chadwickasked her what it had been like to be a Surrealist muse. Carrington’s answer was a flat refusal of the whole premise:

I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse… I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist.

The line circulates in two forms: the short one above, and a blunter, longer version the Met itself quotes, which opens “I thought it was bullshit. I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse…” Those are the same statement in fuller and shorter dress, not two different quotes. And note what the line is and is not: it is a general statement of her stance, not a sentence she ever said about this canvas. But it names exactly what the painting does. The picture is the refusal made in paint, four years or so before she put it into words, the woman who would not be the muse painting herself as the artist instead.

The escape this painting forecasts turned literal, and fast. When the Second World War broke out, Ernst, a German national in France, was interned as an enemy alien. Carrington fled south to Spain, where she suffered a severe breakdown and was institutionalized, an ordeal she later set down in her memoir Down Below. She left this canvas behind with Ernst, and he carried it to New York in 1941 when he emigrated. Carrington’s own road ran differently: she reached Mexico in 1942and stayed for the rest of her long life, becoming one of the central figures of Mexican Surrealism. The horse galloping out the window got where it was going. The painting had a long second life of its own: as the muse-refusal it makes in paint, it became a touchstone for the rewriting of Surrealism’s story to put its women back behind the easel, not only inside the frame.

The canvas’s own travels are short and a little melancholy. (The provenance is the documented chain of owners from the artist’s hand to now.) Left with Ernst in France, it went with him to New York in 1941. Sometime after December 1942 Ernst gave it to the dealer Pierre Matisse (the youngest son of the painter Henri Matisse), in whose family it then stayed: it passed to his widow, Maria-Gaetana Matisse, on Pierre’s death in 1989, and in 2002 the Pierre and Maria-Gaetana Matisse Foundation gave it to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it hangs today under the credit line “The Pierre and Maria-Gaetana Matisse Collection, 2002” and the accession number 2002.456.1. The young woman’s dream-room of escape ended on a wall in the Modern wing, a long way from the Lancashire drawing room she painted her way out of.