A dream-room, furnished from her own head

The first thing to understand about the making of this picture is that it is not a record of a real place. Carrington did not set up an easel in a room and paint what was there. She built the room, an enclosed interior of two walls meeting at a corner, a tiled floor, a curtained window, and then furnished it with things that obey the logic of a dream rather than the logic of a house: a rocking-horse that floats, a hyena that stands in the middle of the floor like a guest, a real horse running loose just outside the glass. Everything in it was chosen. The room is a stage she assembled to hold a set of private symbols.

Those symbols were not invented for the canvas either. The same creatures walk through the stories Carrington was writing in these very years. The hyena is the clearest case: in her short story The Debutante, written around 1937 to 1938, a young woman about to be presented at a society ball sends a hyena to take her place, dressed in her clothes, so she can stay home and read. The horse runs all through her later writing and her play Pénélope, about a girl in love with a rocking horse. So the painting is not an isolated puzzle. It is one room in a private world she was building in words and paint at the same time, and the animals are its recurring cast.

Notice the finish. Carrington paints this impossible room with a flat, clean, almost storybook exactness: clear outlines, even light, every object set down with the patient solidity of an old illuminated manuscript or a tarot card. That precision is doing a job. The more matter-of-factly the floating rocking-horse and the human-eyed hyena are rendered, the more the eye accepts them as simply, calmly there. This is the shared trick of Surrealist painting at large, paint the irrational with hard, convincing conviction so the impossible reads as fact, and Carrington handles it with a steadiness that is striking in so young a painter. The dream is delivered deadpan, which is exactly what makes it convincing.