Leonora Carrington work painted during psychiatric confinement to go on show for first time

Exclusive: Villa Pilar, painted in 1940 during the surrealist artist’s stay in a Spanish sanatorium, will be displayed at London’s Freud museum A recently discovered painting by the surrealist artist Leonora Carrington, made during her confinement in a Spanish psychiatric hospital during the second world war, will go on public display for the first time in London this summer. Known as Villa Pilar, the work was painted in 1940 while Carrington was a patient at sanatorium Morales in Santander, after fleeing Nazi-occupied France after the arrest of her partner, the German artist Max Ernst. Carrington suffered a psychological breakdown in Madrid and was admitted to the institution, where she underwent traumatic psychiatric treatments that she later described in her memoir Down Below. But encouraged by her psychiatrist, Dr Luis Morales, Carrington sketched each day, and created two paintings, Down Below and Villa Pilar, which depict the psychiatric hospital as a symbolic underworld. Carrington described her “down below” period as an experience akin to “being dead”. Villa Pilar will join the exhibition Leonora Carrington – the Symptomatic Surreal at the Freud museum, where Sigmund Freud