A runaway debutante picks up a brush

Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) was born into exactly the kind of life this painting is trying to get out of. Her father ran a wealthy Lancashire textile fortune; she was a debutante (a young upper-class woman formally presented to high society, the whole point of which was to be looked at, approved of, and married well). She hated it. She was expelled from convent schools, presented at court and bored stiff by it, and by her late teens she had decided, against ferocious family pressure, to become a painter instead of an ornament.

In 1937, in London, she met the German Surrealist painter Max Ernst (1891–1976), then in his mid-forties and married. They became lovers, and she left England to live with him, first in Paris and then in a village in the south of France. This is how she walked into Surrealism, the movement, launched in Paris in the 1920s, that set out to paint the contents of dreams and the unconscious mind. Carrington did not arrive as anyone’s pupil or anyone’s muse. She arrived as an artist, and the proof is this canvas. She began it in London and finished it in Paris, around 1937 to 1938, when she was about twenty.

That is young to make a picture this assured. And it is often called her first truly Surrealist painting, which is fair as a critical judgment, the moment her private world and the movement’s methods locked together. What she made was not a portrait in any ordinary sense. It is a self-portrait that is also a dream, a sealed room she built and then put herself inside, surrounded by animals of her own choosing.