A film about the war photographer and model Lee Miller will be released this year. Her son is our guide for a trip to Farleys, her art-filled Sussex home
here’s an original Picasso tile – of an abstract face with a yellow nose – roughly cemented into the wall above the Aga in the kitchen of Farleys House in East Sussex. “Patsy used to scrub it with Vim,” says Jenny, my guide. “Lee and Roland believed art was to be lived with – not just for a museum.”
Though views of the Downs were filmed here, a replica of the sitting room was created in a studio in Budapest. But “everything is spot on, even the paintings on the walls were perfectly recreated,” says Antony. What he does remember is the stream of interesting characters who came to stay at Farleys, many of them friends from her time in prewar France. Picasso “smelt good and was good for cuddles”. Man Ray was “very funny and generous with his time”. The visitors’ book is a who’s who of the 20th-century art scene, with signatures, poems and drawings by luminaries including surrealist poet Paul Éluard and artists Max Ernst and Joan Miró.
“The film is very honest,” says Antony. “She doesn’t emerge as a shiny heroine but as a badly scarred person for whom the price of her journalism was extreme – yet she never expected any sympathy.”Besides the regular house tours, Farleys offers longer, private tours with a member of the Penrose family, with the option of learning more about the vast archive of photos and manuscripts . There are two galleries, too.
There’s a programme of workshops and events, too, and each August a surrealist picnic takes place in the grounds. I stroll the gardens, which are dotted with intriguing sculptures and imagine the colourful people who have been here before.
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