On a spring day in 2009 I phoned my cousin Leonora Carrington with some big news. A painting by her, The Giantess (c 1950), had been sold at auction in New York for almost $1.5 million, the first of her works to break the million-dollar barrier.
It took me a while to convince her this wasn’t a joke, so I can’t imagine what her reaction would have been if I could have called her now. On May 15 another of her paintings, The Distractions of Dagobert (1945), went under the hammer at Sotheby’s in New York for $28.5 million. Which means Leonora is the highest-selling British female artist in history and the fifth highest-selling female artist globally, trumped only by Georgia O’Keeffe, Louise Bourgeois, Joan
