Leonora Carrington’s Lost Painting Villa Pilar Reappears Ahead of London Exhibition
A long-missing Leonora Carrington painting has surfaced in Spain, bringing new attention to the artist’s time in a psychiatric hospital and to a small but crucial body of work she made there in 1940. Villa Pilar, one of only two known paintings Carrington produced at Peña Castillo, has been identified with the family of her former psychiatrist, Luis Morales, and will be loaned to the Freud Museum in London for Leonora Carrington: The Symptomatic Surreal, opening July 1.
The rediscovery gives fresh shape to a chapter in Carrington’s life that has often been treated primarily as biography. Carrington arrived in Santander after escaping Nazi-occupied France, and Morales treated her with shock therapy while also encouraging her to keep drawing. The exhibition’s curator, Vanessi Boni, has argued that the works from this period should be understood as formative rather than merely documentary, a view that places the Santander material within the larger arc of Carrington’s artistic development.
Villa Pilar is closely related to Down Below (1940), the other known painting from Peña Castillo. Both works feature Carrington’s unsettling hybrid creatures and a landscape suspended between daylight and darkness. Villa Pilar also introduces a more explicit safari register, with references to a lion, a leopard, a Cape buffalo, and a peacock. The painting’s identification follows a search that Boni orchestrated after earlier leads failed to produce it; in 2017, scholar Salomon Grimberg had noted that Carrington gave the work to Morales.
The Freud Museum has extended the exhibition’s run from June 28 to August 10 to mark the painting’s return to view. Down Below will leave the museum on June 28 for routine conservation work, but the two paintings are expected to be reunited when Symptomatic Surreal travels to Faro Santander on September 8. That presentation will bring Carrington’s full sanatorium corpus back to the city where she first made it, nearly a century ago.
