A long-lost painting by Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington, titled *Villa Pilar* (1940), has been rediscovered in Spain with the family of her former psychiatrist, Luis Morales. The work was created during Carrington's six-month stay at Morales's Peña Castillo sanatorium in Santander, where she was treated after escaping Nazi-occupied France. The painting will debut publicly at the Freud Museum in London as part of the exhibition “Leonora Carrington: The Symptomatic Surreal,” curated by Vanessa Boni, which gathers artworks from that period. The Morales family still owns the painting but is lending it to the show, which runs from July 1 to August 10, before the work travels to the Faro Santander art center in September.
This rediscovery matters because *Villa Pilar* is one of only two paintings Carrington produced during her hospitalization, a formative yet often overlooked chapter in her career. The exhibition reframes her time at the sanatorium not merely as a biographical crisis but as a crucial stage in her artistic development, where themes of hybrid creatures and liminal spaces emerged. The reunion of *Villa Pilar* with its companion piece *Down Below* at Faro Santander will offer the first complete view of Carrington's sanatorium output, potentially reshaping art-historical understanding of her work.