Farleys House & Gallery to Move Into Charity Structure as Family Seeks Long-Term Future
A Sussex house long associated with Lee Miller and Roland Penrose is entering a new chapter. Antony Penrose is transferring Farleys House & Gallery to a newly established charity, a move designed to secure the site’s future while keeping the Lee Miller Archive in family ownership.
The change comes after years of renewed attention to Miller’s work, including the feature film Lee and Tate Britain’s recent retrospective, but Ami Bouhassane, Miller’s granddaughter and co-director of the Lee Miller Archives, said the decisive factor was the pressure exposed by the Covid pandemic. “We nearly closed forever,” she said. “Covid was a real wake-up call when it came to thinking about how we safeguard Farleys and make sure it is there for future generations.”
Roland Penrose bought the secluded farmhouse in 1949 as a place of recuperation for Miller, who had witnessed the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp and documented some of the most harrowing scenes of the Nazi era. Over time, Farleys became a gathering place for major figures of 20th-century art. Pablo Picasso made an ink drawing of the farm’s bulls. Leonora Carrington stayed there with her sons. Joan Miró studied the garden birds. Dorothea Tanning did household chores. Alfred Barr, the founding director of MoMA, helped feed the pigs.
The house’s reputation changed dramatically decades later, when Antony Penrose and his late wife Suzanna opened boxes in the attic and found thousands of negatives and prints, along with maps and manuscripts, all jumbled together and long forgotten. That discovery helped transform Miller’s standing from a largely overlooked figure into the subject of more than a dozen major exhibitions in the past decade.
Under the new arrangement, the charity will take ownership of the house, surrounding farmland and associated buildings, while the archive itself remains with the family. The charity will have exclusive rights to manage and use the archive, and family members will serve as trustees alongside a new board that includes former BFI chief executive Amanda Nevill and Patrick Elliott, curator of Modern paintings at the National Gallery, London.
Bouhassane said the family’s long run as a private company had made it harder to attract outside support. The charitable structure, she said, will make it possible to pursue formal museum accreditation and give Farleys a more durable institutional framework. The family also hopes to expand its role as a center for photography outside London, building on exhibitions devoted to Dorothea Tanning, Eileen Agar and the current show on Dorothy Bohm.
For the Penrose family, the transfer marks a significant turning point. As Bouhassane put it, the process has involved “a lot of soul-searching,” but it now feels like the right moment to ensure that one of Britain’s most distinctive artist houses can endure beyond the family that shaped it.
