A long-lost painting by Leonora Carrington, titled *Villa Pillar* (1940), will be publicly exhibited for the first time in over 80 years at the Freud Museum in London starting July 1. The work was created while Carrington was a patient in a Spanish sanatorium in Santander, where she was treated by psychiatrist Luis Morales. Carrington gave the painting to Morales, and his family kept it until researchers from the forthcoming Faro Santander art center discovered it and convinced the family to loan it for the exhibition “The Symptomatic Surreal,” which traces Carrington’s development from 1938 to 1941 through her sketchbooks and letters. The show, which opened in March, has been extended through August 10 and will later travel to Faro Santander when it opens in September.
The reappearance of *Villa Pillar* matters because it sheds new light on a traumatic but formative period in Carrington’s life—her flight from Nazi-occupied France, hospitalization in Spain, and eventual journey to New York. The painting has never been seen publicly, and its recovery adds a significant work to the known oeuvre of a Surrealist artist who has received renewed attention in recent years, particularly after the 2022 Venice Biennale, curated by Cecilia Alemani, took its title from Carrington’s book *The Milk of Dreams*. The exhibition also reunites Carrington’s Santander sketchbooks, which were sold by dealer Julien Levy in 2004, with her letters and paintings for the first time in a major museum setting.