Bringing Lee Miller’s life, and work, into sharp focus
Visiting Farleys House and Gallery at the moment is a little like life imitating art, imitating life.
Aptly dubbed ‘The Home of the Surrealists’ because of its previous owners’ involvement in that arts movement, it was once the family home of one of the UK’s leading surrealist artists of the time Roland Penrose and his wife, the world acclaimed photographer Elizabeth ‘Lee’ Miller - currently the subject major new movie LEE, starring Kate Winslet.
Miller and Penrose lived at Farleys from 1949; and in the 35 years that followed, they filled their home with a collection of contemporary art treasures and were visited by some of the key personalities of twentieth century art. Today, Farleys House and Gallery is the base of the Lee Miller Archives and The Penrose Collection from which books, exhibitions and reproduction rights are privately managed by the family.
Tucked away, in the midst of some glorious Sussex countryside, the place is one of the few places in the world which actually deserves that much overused one-word description: “unique”.
As well as a family home, it became a social hub for friends and some of the most famous artists of their time.
Present day visitors can walk through the doorway of Farleys on guided tours, stepping back in time - and into an entirely different world.
Miller herself was a model, a photographer, a protégé, lover and muse of Man Ray, a war correspondent and a gourmet cook - but it was only in 1977 that her son Antony Penrose began to piece together a more complete picture of her life when he found an unknown archive of around 60,000 negatives and prints in the attic of their home.
According to a Guardian article from 2016, if it wasn’t for that discovery in the attic, he would have remained a dairy farmer. “Lee wasn’t much of a mum during her lifetime,” he admitted in the article. “But she sure as hell has given me plenty to do since. She’s left me this amazing time capsule. It enables me to visit key moments in history and the work of important artists.”
Born in Poughkeepsie, New York Lee became a model for Vogue and Vanity Fair magazines before moving to Paris to study photography with Man Ray. Over time, she produced a body of work surpassing most other contemporary photographers.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, Miller was living in London with Roland Penrose. It was at this time she embarked on a new career in photojournalism, as the official war photographer for Vogue. And in December 1942, she was accredited with the US Army as a ‘war correspondent’ for Conde Nast Publications.
She then worked alongside the American photographer David E Scherman on many assignments including the liberation of Paris, and the horror of the Nazi concentration camps. Scherman's photograph of Miller in the bathtub of Adolf Hitler’s apartment in Munich - with the dust of Dachau on her boots deliberately dirtying Hitler's bathroom - is one of the most iconic images from the Miller-Scherman partnership.
To some, she is one of the most fascinating figures of the 20th century, and it’s little surprise to find her life and work ending up in cinema screens across the world.
Farleys House and Gallery today feels a million miles away from the horrors of the war, which affected Miller for the rest of her life.
Guided tours of the House can be booked in advance, the garden is punctuated by sculptures old-and-new, and the main Gallery is housed in an adjacent old Sussex barn - and hosts a regular programme of exhibitions, workshops and events.
The current exhibition, Lee & LEE, pairs some of Lee Miller’s most iconic photographs with their counterparts from the highly anticipated feature film LEE which hit the big screens across the UK and Ireland from 13 September.
Running through to 31 October 2024, the exhibition showcases comparative images of Lee Miller’s wartime reportage alongside photographs by Kimberley French (official photographer for LEE) of meticulously researched scenes recreated for the film. It also features photographs by Kate Winslet taken on set whilst filming using a Rolleiflex camera that was carefully researched and compared with Lee Miller’s own camera which can be seen on the house tour at Farleys.
Farleys not only makes for a marvellous, magical insight into Penrose and Miller’s work, it also brings their remarkable life stories into sharp focus.