How Leonora Carrington Turned Animals Into Self-Portraits

Feature image: Leonora Carrington, And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur, 1953 © 2026 Leonora Carrington / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York via MoMA.

Painters have long assigned meaning to animals. Medieval bestiaries assigned every creature a moral, heraldry gave each great family a beast to stand behind, and the Surrealists of the 1920s and 1930s adopted private totems of their own. Max Ernst signed himself into his pictures as Loplop, the Superior of the Birds. Leonora Carrington, who joined that circle in 1937, built a bestiary that museums and scholars describe in the language of self-portraiture. The Metropolitan Museum of Art calls her white horse a "symbolic surrogate," the Museum of Modern Art lists it among her "autobiographical symbols," and the art historian Whitney Chadwick argues that in her work magical animals take over the mediating role that male Surrealists gave to the image of woman. Leonora Carrington's animals fall into four recurring groups, the horse, the hyena, the bird, and the hybrid.

The horse is the earliest of the four. Carrington was born on 6 April 1917 in Lancashire, the daughter of a wealthy textile manufacturer and an Irish mother, and grew up at Crookhey Hall, a Gothic Revival mansion near Cockerham. Horses appear in her drawings from at least 1929. The scholar Susan Aberth describes the horse as Carrington's animal self and a symbol of freedom and liberty, and Georgiana Colvile calls it her totem of freedom, love, and initiation. Carrington herself said, "A horse gets mixed up with one's body, it gives energy and power."

Scholars trace the symbol to two sources. The first is Celtic. Carrington heard Irish legends from her mother, her grandmother, and her Irish nanny, and Gloria Orenstein connects her horse to Epona, the white horse goddess of Celtic religion. The second is the nursery. In the stories of The Oval Lady, a girl named Lucretia loves her rocking horse, Tartar, and announces, "I am going to transform myself into a horse of snow." Her father burns the toy. Orenstein derives the name Tartar from Tartarus, the underworld of Greek myth, and the Schirn Kunsthalle describes the rocking horse as a symbol of the girl's imagination, which the men around her control or threaten to destroy. Alice Spawls, writing in the London Review of Books, links the horse to freedom and sexuality. In Carrington's first short story, The House of Fear, a horse guides the heroine into another world.

French authorities arrested Ernst as an enemy alien in 1939 and again in 1940, and Carrington, after a breakdown in Spain, was committed to an asylum in Santander. She reached New York in 1941. Leonora Carrington's Horses (1941) dates from that year. Colvile calls it a utopian painting of horses in freedom, set in a landscape empty of people, and identifies it as the last canvas Carrington devoted to the horse.

Leonora Carrington's Green Tea (1942) followed a year later. The Museum of Modern Art, which holds the painting, describes it as possibly a meditation on her confinement in Spain, with a white horse chained to a tree. Colvile writes that the horse seems to disappear from Carrington's work after her move to Mexico in 1942, replaced by a wider bestiary. The Schirn Kunsthalle identifies a white horse among the deities of the mural she painted for the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City in 1963.

The hyena appears beside the horse in the late 1930s. In the story of the debutante, which André Breton included in his Anthology of Black Humor in 1940, a girl who dreads her coming-out ball sends a hyena in her place, disguised in the face of the maid it has devoured. Carrington kept the identification late in life. "I'm like a hyena, I get into the garbage cans," she said in a 1999 interview. "I have an insatiable curiosity."

Leonora Carrington's Self-Portrait (c. 1937-38) places the hyena beside the artist. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which owns the canvas, describes Carrington seated with her hand extended toward a prancing hyena while a white horse gallops into the landscape beyond the window. Women in World History notes that the hyena has three breasts and a human-like expression, a combination that blurs the line between animal and human.

Accounts of the hyena's meaning center on its ambiguity. Medieval bestiaries held that the hyena could change its sex, male at one time and female at another, and judged the animal unclean. The reference site The Art Story writes that Carrington was apparently drawn to the hyena's "rebellious spirit and its ambiguous sexual characteristics." Colvile reads the hyena and the white horse together as the two sides of a single goddess, good and evil, life and death. Sources disagree on how long the hyena lasted in the paintings. Colvile wrote in 1991 that it is confined to the early work, and the reference work Women in World History states that it reappears in later ones.

The bird entered Carrington's work through Ernst, whose alter ego was Loplop. At the farmhouse the couple shared in Saint-Martin-d'Ardèche from 1938, birds nested in the walls, and the two artists covered the building with cement casts of mythical animals and birds. In 1942, she published a text titled The Bird Superior, Max Ernst in the New York magazine View. That year, she moved to Mexico, where she lived, on and off, for the rest of her life. There, she studied alchemy, the Kabbalah, and the Maya creation text known as the Popol Vuh alongside the Spanish painter Remedios Varo and the Hungarian photographer Kati Horna, and she read Robert Graves's The White Goddess, a study of an ancient goddess of birth, love, and death that she called "the greatest revelation of my life."

In the Mexican paintings, the bird is tied to the egg. Spawls notes that Carrington increasingly worked in egg tempera and treated cooking as a kind of alchemy comparable to painting. Chadwick reads the eggs in her pictures as symbols of birth and creation whose meaning is bound to that medium, in which pigment is mixed with yolk. The Art Story adds that the geese of her 1940s work may reflect her interest in Irish culture, in which geese signify migration, travel, and homecoming.

Leonora Carrington finished The Kitchen Garden on the Eyot (1946), a tempera panel, days before the birth of her son. Writing for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2020, Solomon Adler describes a rooster, a yard of hens, and a glowing bird that lays eggs in midair, and he connects the eggs in the picture to the yolk that binds its paint. Carrington described childbirth as "an earthshaking thing."

"In everybody, there is an inner bestiary," Carrington said. Her pictures are filled with animals and animal-headed figures, which Spawls describes as sometimes sinister and sometimes "guides to the unconscious." Colvile defines the hybrids as unions of the human, generally feminine, with the animal, the vegetable, the mineral, and the mythic. She traces them first to the Celtic legends of Carrington's childhood and then to Maya culture, which she says enriched the bestiary after 1942. Carrington's mother told her that the family descended from the Tuatha Dé Danann, the fairy people of Irish legend.

Scholars also read the hybrid politically. Chadwick writes that in Carrington's art "animal guides lead the way out of a world of men who don't know magic," and she credits nature as a source of creative power for the woman artist. Karen Eckersley reports that Carrington described herself as born a "female human animal." Eckersley reads the hybrids of the stories, starting from the 1970 essay What Is a Woman?, as a call for women to ally themselves with the natural world.

Leonora Carrington painted Ulu's Pants (1952) ten years after her move to Mexico. The Art Story describes "hybrid characters" in a "labyrinthine world," attributes them to the Celtic mythology of her childhood and her exposure to Mexican traditions, and reads the creatures searching the maze as figures of self-discovery. An egg at the lower right, guarded by a red-headed figure, is described there as a symbol of fertility and rebirth.

Leonora Carrington's The Lovers (1987) dates from the year she turned seventy. The gallery Almine Rech, which showed the painting in Paris in 2026, places it among late works concerned with myth, alchemy, and spirituality. A reviewer of that exhibition described figures with covered faces in an ochre room, with animals among them, and wrote that it "looked more like a ceremony than a love scene."

In her final years, Carrington turned to large bronze sculptures, which Almine Rech describes as "protective deities and guides between worlds." She died in Mexico City on 25 May 2011, aged 94. The 2022 Venice Biennale took its title, The Milk of Dreams, from one of her books, and in 2026 the Musée du Luxembourg gave her a major survey in Paris.

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