Leonora Carrington painting auctioned for £22.5m in record for UK-born female artist

Leonora Carrington's Les Distractions de Dagobert ‘is one of the most admired works in the history of surrealism’, said the painting’s buyer. Photograph: Sarah Yenesel/EPA

She was worshipped as a muse by renowned surrealists including André Breton and Max Ernst, but the Lancashire-born artist Leonora Carrington quickly shrugged off the label to achieve an unprecedented level of mastery and freedom in her own painting.

Now, on the 100th anniversary of Breton’s publication of the Surrealist Manifesto, Carrington has become the most valuable British-born female artist at auction after one of her paintings sold for more than £22.5m.