[4][5] Mary Leonora Carrington was born on 6 April 1917 at Westwood House in Clayton-le-Woods, Lancashire,[6][7][8] England, into a Roman Catholic family.

[9] Her father, Harold Wylde Carrington, was a wealthy textile manufacturer,[7][10] and her mother, Marie (née Moorhead), was from Ireland.

She returned to England and was presented at Court but, according to her, because she had no intention of being "sold to the highest bidder" she brought a copy of Aldous Huxley's Eyeless in Gaza (1936) to read instead.

[12][17] She was one of the first students at the Academy, the others being Stella Snead and Ursula Goldfinger, under the instruction of Sari Dienes, who co-directed the school.

[12] The portrait was not her first Surrealist work; between 1937 and 1938 Carrington painted Self-Portrait, also called The Inn of the Dawn Horse, now exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Sporting white jodhpurs and a wild mane of hair, Carrington is perched on the edge of a chair in this curious, dreamlike scene, her hand outstretched toward a prancing hyena and her back to a tailless rocking horse flying behind her.

[23] She stayed with family friends in Madrid until her paralyzing anxiety and delusions led to a psychotic break and she was admitted into an asylum.

They had been introduced in Paris by their common acquaintance Pablo Picasso (both men knew each other from bull fights) and agreed to a marriage of convenience with Carrington so that she would be accorded the immunity given to a diplomat's wife.

After spending a year in New York, Leduc and Carrington went to Mexico, where many European artists fled in search of asylum, in 1942, which she grew to love and where she lived, on and off, for the rest of her life.

[8] While in Mexico she was asked, in 1963, to create a mural which she named El Mundo Magico de los Mayas,[29] and which was influenced by folk stories from the region.

[4] Through these beliefs Carrington understood that "greater cooperation and sharing of knowledge between politically active women in Mexico and North America" was important for emancipation.

[4] Carrington's political commitment led to her winning the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Women's Caucus for Art convention in New York in 1986.

I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist.She later married Emerico Weisz (nicknamed "Chiki"), born in Hungary in 1911, a photographer and the darkroom manager for Robert Capa during the Spanish Civil War.

Self-Portrait (1937–38) also offers insight into Carrington's interest in the "alchemical transformation of matter and her response to the Surrealist cult of desire as a source of creative inspiration.

[4] The symbol of the hyena is present in many of Carrington's later works, including "La Debutante" in her book of short stories The Oval Lady.

It has been suggested that the events of the book should not be taken literally, given Carrington's state at the time of her institutionalization; however, recent authors have sought to examine the details of her institution in order to discredit this theory.

It follows the story of older women who, in the words of Madeleine Cottenet-Hage in her essay "The Body Subversive: Corporeal Imagery in Carrington, Prassinos and Mansour", seek to destroy the institutions of their imaginative society to usher in a "spirit of sisterhood.

"[46][47]: 86–87  The Hearing Trumpet also criticizes the shaming of the nude female body, and it is believed to be one of the first books to tackle the notion of gender identity in the twentieth century.

While this may seem to differ from certain modern feminist perspectives, the cave, of which Carrington offers many versions, is the setting for a symbolic coming to life, not an actual birth-giving ("and this can mean aquatic or maternal, this can be double, in my opinion"; mère and mer, following Simone de Beauvoir).

[51] The first major exhibition of her work in UK for twenty years took place at Chichester's Pallant House Gallery, West Sussex, from 17 June to 12 September 2010, and subsequently in Norwich at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, as part of a season of major international exhibitions called Surreal Friends that celebrated women's role in the Surrealist movement.

Her work was exhibited alongside pieces by her close friends, the Spanish painter Remedios Varo (1908–1963) and the Hungarian photographer Kati Horna (1912–2000).

Titled The Celtic Surrealist, it was curated by Sean Kissane and examined Carrington's Irish background to illuminate many cultural, political and mythological themes present in her work.

In her first published short story, "The House of Fear", Carrington portrays a horse in the role of a psychic guide to a young heroine.

[12] Carrington contributed to the 1973 Mexican horror film The Mansion of Madness directed by Juan López Moctezuma, loosely based on the Edgar Allan Poe short story The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether.

The repeated appearance of a white horse, Carrington's alter ego, and the elaborate surreal feasts and costumes show her influence and vision.

This name is borrowed from a book by Carrington, in which, the Italian curator Cecilia Alemani says she, "describes a magical world where life is constantly re-envisioned through the prism of the imagination, and where everyone can change, be transformed, become something and someone else.

[65] In November 2023, a posthumous ceremony celebrating Carrington's works was held in the Senate of the Republic, the upper house of the Mexican Congress.

[1] The sculpture El jaguar de la noche was donated by the Museo Leonora Carrington to be displayed in the Senate Building.