Leonora Carrington’s Santander Sketchbooks Reunite at London’s Freud Museum After Two Decades
In 1940, as Leonora Carrington tried to survive a severe psychological collapse, she drew as if her life depended on it. Confined in a sanatorium in Santander, Spain, the British artist filled sketchbooks with scenes that recast the hospital as an “underworld” — a shifting realm of hybrid beasts, unstable horses, and symbolic fragments that would later feed into her painting “Down Below.”
Those works, long scattered among private collections, have now been brought back into conversation in “Leonora Carrington: The Symptomatic Surreal,” opening at the Freud Museum in London. The exhibition is the first institutional show in the city dedicated to Carrington since 1991, and it unfolds inside the former home of Sigmund Freud, the psychoanalyst whose ideas about dreams and repression helped shape Surrealism’s intellectual weather.
Carrington (1917–2011) was born in northern England and raised amid privilege she would later reject. In 1938 she moved to Paris to be with her lover, German artist Max Ernst (1891–1976), entering the Surrealist orbit at the moment Europe was tipping toward catastrophe. War soon tore that world apart: Ernst fled to the United States, and Carrington, devastated, sought refuge in Spain. Her mental state deteriorated rapidly. After experiencing psychosis, she was admitted to a sanatorium in Santander, where she underwent Cardiazol shock therapy — a treatment now widely regarded as brutal.
During her confinement, Carrington’s doctor, Luis Morales, encouraged her to draw obsessively. The resulting pages — along with letters and related material — map a private cosmology built from the occult, mythology, and tarot, a vocabulary Carrington repeatedly used to probe the psyche without reducing it to a single explanation. She later described the period as “very much like having been dead,” a line that underscores the exhibition’s central tension: the work’s proximity to trauma, and its refusal to be contained by it.
The Santander sketchbooks include two preparatory drawings for “Down Below,” offering a rare look at how Carrington first conceived the human-animal hybrids that populate the painting. Horses recur throughout the notebooks, appearing, as curator Vanessa Boni has observed, “in shifting and unstable forms” — less a stable emblem than a creature continually remade.
Although Freud did not directly influence these particular drawings, the setting invites a charged comparison. Boni has noted that the images “touch on experiences — trauma, breakdown, the dissolution of the self — that have often been interpreted through a Freudian, psychoanalytic lens.” At the same time, she argues, Carrington’s drawings resist that kind of reading by transforming inner conflict into a personal symbolic mythology rather than a case study.
The Freud Museum has sharpened that dialogue by placing Carrington’s work alongside antiquities from Freud’s own collection. Among them are an ancient Egyptian statue of Anubis, the half-jackal, half-man deity associated with the underworld, and several horse figurines that echo Freud’s fascination with objects as prompts for thinking about the mind.
The exhibition also traces a story of displacement shared, in different ways, by both figures. Freud, who was Jewish, fled Vienna after the Gestapo raided his home, resettling in London’s Hampstead in 1938. He spent the last year of his life in the house that is now the museum, dying in 1939.
Carrington, after her release from the sanatorium, briefly lived in New York before moving to Mexico, where she spent most of her adult life. While in the United States, she gave the Santander sketchbooks to the collector Julien Levy, who safeguarded them for 60 years. After they were auctioned in 2004, the material dispersed into multiple private collections.
At the Freud Museum, much of it is reunited for the first time in more than two decades — not as a tidy narrative of illness and recovery, but as evidence of an artist forging images under pressure, and insisting on the imagination as a form of survival.
