In 1937, Leonora Carrington began Self-Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse), a painting that quickly became central to her early Surrealist identity. Its animal figures—especially the horse and hyena—introduced symbols she would return to in both painting and fiction. The work also signaled her move from academic training toward Surrealism’s dreamlike, symbolic storytelling.
In 1938, Carrington exhibited in major Surrealist shows in Paris and Amsterdam. These exhibitions placed her work within the core international network of Surrealist artists and writers. The connections she formed helped her publish and circulate her stories as well as her images.
In 1938, Carrington’s short surreal tale The House of Fear was published as a chapbook, illustrated by Max Ernst. The story’s speaking horses and embodied emotion show how she treated fiction as a dream-logic counterpart to painting. This debut established her as both a visual artist and a writer within Surrealist circles.
Later in 1938, Carrington and Max Ernst moved from Paris to Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche in southern France. Living and working there, she painted and wrote intensively, developing a personal Surrealist world filled with animals, metamorphosis, and satire. This period set the stage for her next major illustrated book and a key painted portrait.
In 1939, Carrington’s story La dame ovale (The Oval Woman) was published in Paris as an illustrated book with Max Ernst’s collages. The book’s small, carefully produced format shows how Surrealists treated literature and visual art as a single combined object. Its themes—family control, transformation, and the horse motif—echo across her later paintings and stories.
Around 1939, Carrington painted Portrait of Max Ernst, showing Ernst in a strange, frozen landscape holding a lantern with a small horse inside. The work captures both intimacy and ambiguity—love mixed with power and confinement—using the horse as a personal symbol. It also foreshadows how war would soon break apart their shared life and reshape her art and writing.
In 1940, Carrington’s story “The Debutante” was published in André Breton’s Anthology of Black Humor. The tale’s cruelly comic swap between a young woman and a hyena shows her distinctive blend of fairy-tale structure and disturbing humor. Publication in a landmark Surrealist anthology also raised her profile as a writer, not only as an artist-muse figure.
In 1940, after Max Ernst’s arrest and the pressures of wartime Europe, Carrington suffered a severe mental health crisis and was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric institution in Santander, Spain. While hospitalized, she produced drawings later known as Sketches from Down Below, linking lived trauma to her Surrealist imagery. This experience became the basis for her memoir Down Below, one of her most influential texts.
In 1941, Carrington entered a marriage of convenience with Mexican diplomat Renato Leduc, which helped her leave Europe safely during World War II. The move was a turning point: it ended her direct participation in the Paris-centered Surrealist circle and pushed her toward new communities abroad. The experience of flight and dislocation also strengthened her themes of captivity, transformation, and self-determination.
By 1942, Carrington arrived in Mexico and began building a life there, ultimately making Mexico City her long-term base. Mexico offered distance from wartime Europe and access to new artistic networks, including other émigré Surrealists. Over time, its everyday rituals, folklore, and politics would become part of her distinctive Surrealist vocabulary in both images and texts.
In 1944, an English-language version of Carrington’s memoir Down Below appeared in the Surrealist magazine VVV. The text turned her institutionalization into a carefully shaped narrative, showing how Surrealism could be used to report extreme reality as well as fantasy. Its publication also connected her Mexican-based life back to an international Surrealist readership during the war years.
Around 1947, Carrington created The Giantess (The Guardian of the Egg), one of her best-known paintings from her Mexico period. The monumental female figure and egg motif suggest protection, regeneration, and a cosmic form of femininity rather than the passive “muse” role common in earlier Surrealist culture. The work shows how her postwar art increasingly centered female power, transformation, and nonhuman life.
After several years in Mexico, Carrington held her first solo exhibition at Galería Clardecor (often dated to the late 1940s). The show signaled that she was no longer simply an expatriate Surrealist in transit but an established artist in Mexico’s cultural scene. This step also helped secure the stability needed for sustained writing and painting in the years that followed.
By about 1950, Carrington had completed The Hearing Trumpet, a surreal novel centered on an elderly woman drawn into an uncanny institution and an escalating web of occult and social satire. Although it would not be published until the 1970s, its completion within this period shows how she extended Surrealist methods into long-form fiction. The manuscript also points to her growing focus on female community, aging, and resistance to control as major themes.
By 1955, Carrington’s key building blocks from 1937–1955 were firmly in place: major early paintings, foundational short stories, the memoir Down Below, and an ambitious novel manuscript. Her work increasingly treated the home, the body, and the nonhuman world as sites of transformation rather than as background for male Surrealist desire. This period closes with her established in Mexico, producing a mature Surrealist art-and-writing practice that would continue for decades.
Leonora Carrington's Surrealist Works and Writings (1937–1955)