Lost Leonora Carrington Painting Emerges After More Than 80 Years
By Vittoria Benzine
At long last, a fabled painting by record-breaking artist Leonora Carrington has turned up in Spain—with the family of the late Surrealist’s former psychiatrist. Now the rediscovered work, Villa Pilar (1940), is heading for the Freud Museum in London. There, it will make its public debut at “Leonora Carrington: The Symptomatic Surreal,” the first-ever exhibition to convene the artworks that Carrington produced during her six-month stint at a Spanish psychiatric hospital.
Carrington famously landed at Luis Morales’s Peña Castillo sanatorium just outside of Santander in 1940, soon after escaping Nazi-occupied France, where her lover Max Ernst had been detained. There, Morales administered Carrington’s shock therapy, and advised her to keep drawing. Carrington gave her sketchbooks from this time to dealer Julien Levy during the year she spent in New York, before moving to Mexico.
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Levy died in 1981. At auction in 2004, several private collectors subsequently snapped up artworks Carrington created during her stay at the psychiatric facility. “Symptomatic Surreal” curator Vanessa Boni orchestrated a search for them. Alas, Villa Pilar—one of just two paintings that Carrington produced at Peña Castillo—remained unaccounted for. In a 2017 journal article, Frida Kahlo expert Salomon Grimberg noted that Carrington had given Villa Pilar to Morales. When Faro Santander joined as a touring partner, their research team set out to locate the artwork. Their crew established contact with the Morales family, who confirmed they had the painting.
Leonora Carrington, Down Below (1940). Image courtesy of Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco, © 2026 Estate of Leonora Carrington / ARS, NY and DACS, London.
Villa Pilar directly echoes the other known painting that Carrington produced while at the institution, Down Below (1940). That title encapsulated Carrington’s feelings about the place, which she equated with the afterlife. Like its sibling, Villa Pilar features breasted animal-human hybrids lounging amid verdant scenery during those liminal hours where light and dark intertwine, their eyes radiating intimidating amusement. Villa Pilar, however, seems to present distinct safari overtones, evoking several iconic Sub-Saharan animals: a lion, a leopard, a Cape Buffalo, and a peacock.
Boni believes it’s time to reconsider how art history regards this challenging episode in Carrington’s saga. “The work done for this exhibition in recovering Carrington’s Santander sketchbook drawings, letters and paintings considers Santander as a formative stage in her development as an artist,” the curator told me over email. “Rather than viewing this period only as a biographical account of her hospitalization, this reassessment reflects on how the themes Carrington starts to explore in these works continue into her later practice.”
Morales’s family still owns Villa Pilar. They’re merely lending the painting to the Faro Santander and Freud Museum, where it will join “Symptomatic Surreal” starting July 1. (The exhibition’s closing date has been extended from June 28 to August 10 to celebrate the artwork’s reemergence.)
Down Below will leave the Freud Museum London as planned on June 28, so it can receive some routine conservation work. Therefore, fans hoping to see that storied painting reunited with Villa Pilar for the first time ever will have to wait until “Symptomatic Surreal” inaugurates the Faro Santander art center on September 8—thus welcoming Carrington’s full sanatorium corpus back to the same city where she first created it, nearly a century ago.
This article was originally published by Artnet News.
