Inside Leonora Carrington's Les Distractions de Dagobert

Feature image: Leonora Carrington, Les Distractions de Dagobert, 1945, © 2026 Estate of Leonora Carrington / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, via Sotheby’s

Les Distractions de Dagobert is a small painting that behaves like a large one. Measuring 75.6 by 87 centimeters and worked in egg tempera on Masonite, it holds dozens of separate incidents inside a single frame, arranged with the density of an illuminated page. Leonora Carrington signed and dated it at the lower right, September 1945, when she was 28 years old and three years into a Mexican exile that would last the rest of her life. To understand how a painter that young arrived at a composition this dense and this strange, the useful place to begin is a decade earlier, in England.

Leonora Carrington was born in 1917 into a prosperous English family, and she trained in art school in London, where she learned egg tempera. That detail matters, because the technique she picked up as a student is the one she was still using twenty years later on the panel in question. At 18, she left England for Paris and entered the Surrealist circle, coming to know Remedios Varo, Man Ray, Salvador Dalí, and Max Ernst. Her relationship with Ernst ended by force of politics rather than choice: German-born Ernst was detained by French authorities at the outbreak of war, and Carrington fled south to Spain, where she suffered a severe breakdown.

Madrid in 1940 supplied the other half of her education. She visited the Prado and came away struck by Hieronymus Bosch, along with Brueghel the Elder and Patinir, painters whose crowded panels would echo through her work for decades. The Surrealists had already claimed Bosch as an ancestor and a painter of the satanic and the fantastic. Hence, the enthusiasm suited the movement, though Carrington now had the paintings themselves in her eye rather than a reproduction. She reached Mexico City in 1942, found the working conditions and the intellectual company she wanted, and stayed.

By the autumn of 1945, Carrington had been in Mexico for three years, and the month she inscribed on the panel sits at a hinge in both world events and her own life. The Second World War concluded officially on September 2nd. She was 28 years old and pregnant with her first child while the work was underway, a circumstance that changes how the fires, births, and generative hybrid creatures across the composition read. The war shaped the picture in a second and less biographical way as well. Like many artists disillusioned by it, Leonora Carrington turned toward ancient and occult systems of knowledge, and Les Distractions de Dagobert borrows the shape of an esoteric diagram to organize what would otherwise be an unruly surface.

Medium and subject both point backward to the Middle Ages. Matthew Affron, curator of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s presentation of "Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100," identifies her London tempera training as the technical foundation of the picture's effect, since egg tempera allowed Carrington the fine detail and the vivid, unmuddied color that oil would have handled differently. The result has the crispness of a manuscript illumination at a scale you can hold in two hands. The title compounds the effect by naming Dagobert I, the seventh-century Merovingian king remembered chiefly for his amorous excesses, and the scenes scattered across the panel appear to unfold as his imaginings. What Carrington took from the Prado five years earlier surfaces here in a Boschian language of hybrid beings, alien horizons of floating islands, and ruined, craggy mountains.

The composition gives every incident equal weight so that the eye can begin anywhere. Affron reports that the most useful published reading divides Les Distractions de Dagobert into four quadrants, each corresponding loosely to one of the classical elements. One holds witches. One shows horse-headed and human figures rising out of a purifying fire. One carries floating islands in the sky populated by ghostly figures. One belongs to a female deity playing a triangular flute. Dagobert himself has to be located rather than encountered. He sits near the center in a red robe on a cow-headed cart, ferried by a servant and led forward by a child, small enough that a first pass over the painting can miss him entirely.

The events around the king proceed on their own terms, which is what gives the panel its unsettling autonomy. In the lower left, a gnarled bat-like creature painted in charred blacks and browns plunges headfirst into a pit of flame while a serene sorceress in a purple robe stands nearby, mask-like faces surfacing in her upturned palms. The elemental scheme is what holds all of this together: Leonora Carrington built a working model of a world rather than a story with a beginning, and the king at the center functions as its dreamer rather than its protagonist.

The figures carrying the painting's supernatural business are almost entirely female, and Affron links that femininity directly to hybridity and multiplicity. A mother appears with her baby, and many figures seem to hold other beings inside themselves, so that the female body in this picture is repeatedly a container for something else. Hybridity mattered both to Surrealism and to the Mexico that Carrington had joined three years earlier, with its fusion of histories and peoples, which makes the choice a local one as much as a movement one. Her method throughout is syncretic. Egyptian mythology sits alongside Celtic material connected to her own family background, fused in the way Surrealist poetry fuses images, and Affron describes that mixing of traditions as her actual invention rather than her borrowing. The historical resonances of the iconography arrive already modernized. The titular king ends up nearly submerged in the world of women beings that surrounds him, which is the quietest and most durable reversal in the painting.

The published literature records no explanation from Leonora Carrington of Les Distractions de Dagobert, and that silence is characteristic rather than accidental. She was famously unwilling to interpret her work for audiences, remarking that she painted for herself, and she treated the machinery of fame with suspicion. Everyone except the artist has therefore supplied interpretation, and the record of that interpretation begins almost immediately. Carrington showed the painting at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York in 1948, where it was cataloged as number one, and the gallery held it until February 1960, when Albert Landry Galleries acquired it. That same year it appeared in a New York exhibition titled "The Inheritance of Hieronymus Bosch," which means the Bosch reading was already in circulation within fifteen years of the painting's completion.

In April 1960, an American private collection bought it, and there it stayed for the next 35 years, surfacing at Sotheby's New York on 21 November 1995 as lot 30, where it sold for $475,500. The Argentinian businessman Eduardo F. Costantini was the underbidder that night. Institutional interest arrived steadily afterward. "Latin Viewpoints: Into the Mainstream" at the Nassau County Museum of Art in 1996 drew a review in The New York Times that September, and a four-venue Japanese tour across 1997 and 1998 took the painting to Tokyo Station Gallery, the Daimaru Museum in Osaka, the Hida Takayama Museum of Art, and the Mie Prefectural Art Museum. In 2001 and 2002 it traveled to Tate Modern and the Metropolitan Museum of Art for "Surrealism: Desire Unbound," listed there as The Pleasures of Dagobert, the alternate English title still in occasional use.

Curatorial appetite intensified sharply in the 2020s, and the painting began appearing on the outsides of catalogs rather than inside them. It ran on the back cover of "Fantastic Women: Surreal Worlds from Meret Oppenheim to Frida Kahlo" at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in 2020, then on the front cover of "Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity" at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and the Museum Barberini in Potsdam across 2022 and 2023. Within two decades, the work had moved from a specialist interest to the image museums chose to sell an entire movement with.

Les Distractions de Dagobert returned to Sotheby's New York on 15 May 2024 as lot 20 of the Modern Evening Auction, carrying an estimate of $12 million to $18 million and an irrevocable bid that guaranteed a sale. Ten minutes of bidding brought it to $28.5 million with fees, an auction record for a British-born woman artist and a figure that dwarfed Carrington's previous high of roughly $3.3 million, set only two years earlier by The Garden of Paracelsus of 1957. Wendi Norris, the San Francisco gallerist who has done much to rebuild Carrington's reputation, placed the work among the top five of the artist's career and said a single book could be written about it. The buyer was Costantini, who had waited 29 years for a second chance at the painting he lost in 1995. He founded MALBA, the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires, and he described his acquisition publicly as an unparalleled masterpiece of Latin American art.

Two institutions borrowed it almost immediately. It went to the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University for "Leonora Carrington: Dream Weaver" between January and June 2025, then to the Philadelphia Museum of Art from November 2025 until February 2026, where it produced the most telling audience reaction on record. Affron notes that many visitors entering the gallery mistook the painting for a Bosch, an error he considers apt. That instinct is worth taking seriously, because it closes a circuit opened by the 1960 exhibition that named Bosch in its title. 

A picture made by an Englishwoman in Mexican exile, first sold through a New York gallery and long held in an American collection, now sits in a Latin American collection under a Latin American frame. At the same time, visitors reach past all of it for a Dutchman four centuries dead. The categories keep shifting around the object, and the object stays exactly as Leonora Carrington left it in September 1945: a four-part world with a small red king at the middle of it, still declining to tell anyone where to look first.

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