Buy a piece of Lancashire's surreal history

With only two properties remaining, this may be the last chance to buy a piece of this history. One of Britain’s best-known artists, the painter Leonora Carrington, lived at Hazelwood Hall in Silverdale, north Lancashire (close to the Lake District) when she was a teenager.

Carrington, who is now 92, moved to Hazelwood from Crookhey Hall near Preston aged ten in 1927. She lived there with her parents, textile millionaire Harold Carrington and his Irish wife Maurie, and her three brothers.

As a youngster growing up at Hazelwood, Carrington was keenly interested in art and in the natural world – animals, especially birds and horses, went on to be a strong feature of her work across a long career.

Her first exposure to art was at finishing school in Florence, after which she studied at art school in London. In 1936 she was introduced to the work of the Surrealists, who were the avant-garde art movement of the moment. The following year she met one of Surrealism’s leading artists, Max Ernst, and fell in love with him. A few months later, she left Hazelwood to go to live with Ernst in Paris – and during their time together in the French capital, she got to know many of the greatest artists of the 20th century including Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali.

During the second world war Carrington and Ernst were separated, and to secure a safe passage out of Europe Carrington married a Mexican diplomat, Renato Leduc, to whom she had been introduced by Picasso. She and Leduc – who later divorced - settled in Mexico City, from where Carrington continued her career as a painter. She remarried a Hungarian photographer, Chiki Weisz, and had two sons – at one point in the early 1950s, she brought the boys to stay with her by-then-widowed mother at Hazelwood.

Today Carrington’s paintings are acclaimed by art historians and gallery-goers throughout the world – in 2008 one of her finest works, The Giantess, was sold at auction in New York for more than US$1.5 million, putting her into the handful of living women painters whose work commands such sums.

Carrington is well known in the US, and her work is included in the collections of several major museums including the Metropolitan in New York. And many believe she is on the cusp of a revival here - her Self-Portrait of 1937-8 was recently shown at Manchester City Art Gallery as part of an exhibition of women Surrealists, and an exhibition of her work, and that of her close friends the Spanish painter Remedios Varo and the Hungarian photographer Kati Horna, opens at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester in June.

Today Carrington still lives in Mexico, where she is one of the darlings of the country’s art scene. In 2008 an eight-month-long homage to her work was mounted in the centre of Mexico City: as well as paintings she has produced a lot of sculpture in recent years, and several examples of her work are dotted around the city. Although she has not travelled to the county for many years, she remains proud of her Lancashire roots – echoes of her years at Hazelwood are to be found in several of her paintings.

Surreal Friends: Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo and Kati Horna opens at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester in June 2010, and travels to the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich in September. For more details, see: pallant.org.uk

Hazelwood Hall has recently been renovated and converted into a range of luxury homes, by Pringle Homes. Only two properties from 20 now remain and are priced from £285,000. For more information, visit: hazelwoodhall.co.uk.