A painting by the Surrealist Leonora Carrington, created while she was hospitalised in a Spanish sanatorium, will go on show for the first time at the Freud Museum in London in July. The newly discovered work, entitled Villa Pilar, will be displayed in the exhibition Leonora Carrington: The Symptomatic Surreal, at the museum from 1 July; the show, which opened in March, will now run until 10 August.
Villa Pilar was made in 1940 while Carrington was a patient at the Morales sanatorium located outside Santander in northern Spain. The artist was admitted to the hospital following the arrest of her partner, the German artist Max Ernst who was classified as an “enemy alien” by the Nazis and detained in late 1939 at the Camp des Milles in Aix-en-Provence.
Leonora Carrington, Villa Pilar (1940)
Photo: Nathan Keay; Courtesy of Faro Santander © 2026 Estate of Leonora Carrington / ARS, NY and DACS, London
Carrington subsequently suffered a severe psychological breakdown in Madrid, ending up in the Santander hospital. Encouraged by her psychiatrist, Luis Morales, Carrington sketched obsessively, depicting the psychiatric hospital as an underworld dotted with hybrid human-animal beasts.
During her six-month stay, she also made two paintings—Villa Pilar and a companion piece, Down Below, which is also the title of her memoir describing her harrowing time in the hospital (first published in 1944). Carrington gave Villa Pilar to Morales when she left the sanatorium.
Joanna Moorhead, Carrington’s cousin and biographer, mentions the newly discovered painting in her book Surreal Spaces: The Life and Art of Leonora Carrington (Thames and Hudson, 2023), and references an interview she did with a friend of Morales, who talked to the psychiatrist towards the end of his life about his relationship with Carrington. “Morales told her that the two of them had kept in touch, by letter and even by phone, for some time after Leonora’s departure [from Spain],” she writes.
Moorhead says the painting’s title, Villa Pilar, relates to one of the areas of the sanatorium where she was a patient. “Down Below was the name of another area of the sanatorium. Art historians have often assumed it was a figurative construct, and of course the title does reference the terrible time in her life when she was being treated for a mental breakdown, but the name was an area of the hospital, as was Villa Pilar. Another work by Leonora from this time is a map of the entire site; you can see from it how she blended her actual surroundings with the psychological turmoil she was going through, making it a fascinating time in her story and in her output.”
In her book, Moorhead also writes about the fact that, late in his life, Morales came to believe Carrington, who had been in her twenties when he treated her, had not been ill at all: “He said, Leonora was not mad…research done later in his life, during the 1970s and beyond, showed he had made many mistakes with his patients, including Leonora.”
Leonora Carrington painted Down Below (1940) during her six-month stay in a psychiatric hospital in northern Spain Image courtesy of Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco; © 2026 Estate of Leonora Carrington / ARS, NY and DACS, London
Villa Pilar is striking in its resemblance to Down Below, and both paintings depict the anguish Carrington was experiencing as an inpatient at the Santander sanatorium. She was confined there after suffering her breakdown in Madrid and was tricked into travelling there, Moorhead says. The bills for the sanatorium were paid for by her family, who knew nothing of the terrible treatment she suffered there, including injections of Cardiazol, a drug that induces seizures, Moorhead adds.
“It’s fascinating to think that Leonora kept in touch with Morales after she left, and it more than hints that there are many things we don’t yet know about this time in her life,” says Moorhead. “This is one of the many periods of Leonora’s life that has been under-researched, and it would be wonderful if the showing of this newly found painting prompts more investigation into what happened to her in the asylum, as she called it.” Carrington died in 2011, aged 94.
Villa Pilar, which is still owned by the Morales family, was unearthed by the curatorial team at Faro Santander, a cultural venue located on Santander’s waterfront, where Leonora Carrington: The Symptomatic Surreal will travel to later this year (8 September-10 January 2027).
Down Below will be on show at the Freud Museum in London until 28 June, with Villa Pilar going on display from early July. Crucially, both works will be shown together in the Spanish leg of the show. Leonora Carrington: The Symptomatic Surreal was discussed on a recent edition of The Art Newspaper podcast The Week in Art.
