A newly discovered painting by Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington, titled *Villa Pilar* (1940), will be exhibited for the first time at the Freud Museum in London starting July 1. The work was created while Carrington was hospitalized at the Morales sanatorium in Santander, Spain, following the arrest of her partner Max Ernst and her subsequent psychological breakdown. The painting, given to her psychiatrist Luis Morales upon her departure, depicts the hospital as an underworld of hybrid creatures. It will be shown alongside its companion piece *Down Below* in the exhibition *Leonora Carrington: The Symptomatic Surreal*, which has been extended through August 10.
This discovery matters because it sheds new light on a pivotal but under-researched period of Carrington's life and work. The painting offers fresh insight into how she blended her actual surroundings with psychological turmoil, challenging earlier assumptions that her sanatorium experience was purely metaphorical. The exhibition also highlights the evolving understanding of Carrington's mental health, as her psychiatrist later questioned whether she was truly ill. For art historians and Surrealism enthusiasts, the work provides a rare, direct visual document of a traumatic chapter that shaped Carrington's iconic imagery.