Until recently, Leonora Carrington was best known as Max Ernst’s lover. The pair had a passionate affair in the South of France, interrupted by nothing less than W.W. II. Ernst was arrested as an enemy alien by the French authorities, and Carrington suffered a breakdown and was hospitalized in a sanatorium in Santander, Spain. It was there, drawing obsessively in sketchbooks, that she produced some of the most charged works of her career. Carrington was no muse—“I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse,” she said. “I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist.” In recent years, her Surrealist work has won long-overdue attention. In 2023, The Wall Street Journal hailed her as “the next Frida Kahlo.” The Freud Museum has now reunited those Santander sketchbooks, which have been in private collections since a sale in 2004. —Elena Clavarino