Leonora Carrington was born into an upper-class English family where she felt stifled by societal constraints placed onto young women—she was presented as a debutante in the court of George V. In her 20s, she fled first to Paris in order to continue her affair with Max Ernst, a married, older, fellow Surrealist, after their introduction in 1937. In Paris, she had already begun painting and became a published author and continued to paint after moving with Ernst to the south of France following his divorce, exhibiting internationally with the Surrealists.

World War II ended the Surrealist movement and Max Ernst was imprisoned in an internment camp as a German citizen. Suffering severe emotional distress, Carrington escaped to Spain where she spent time in a psychiatric hospital. She later married a Mexican diplomat, which facilitated her escape from Europe to New York and then Mexico. She would rarely return to Europe.

Despite Carrington’s break with her family and the home country of her birth, the Gothic revival mansion, Crookhey hall where she spent several years of her childhood, and the upper-class customs of the hunt continued to exert influence over her imagination and her art. She made at least two paintings of the hunt, including La gran cacería, for which the present work is a study.

Carrington spent part of the 1960s in New York where she possibly made the present example. In Mexico, a year later, she was asked to paint a mural, which she titled El Mundo Magico de los Mayas and was inspired by local folk stories. In 1948, she had her first solo exhibition at Pierre Matisse gallery and later had a solo show at the prestigious Galerie Pierre, an occasion in which she made a rare return to Europe.

Recent years have seen a surging interest in the works of Leonora Carrington and her paintings now regularly sell for over $1 million. In 2015 she was given a retrospective at Tate Liverpool, a new biography written by Carrington’s cousin was published in 2017, the centenary of her birth, and her short stories have been reissued in new editions. Her works on canvas from a similar period have sold for up to $1.9 million at auction.