Farleys House and Gallery

Born in Poughkeepsie, New York, Lee Miller went to Paris in 1929, where she met the Surrealist artist and photographer Man Ray (1890-1976). She became well known both as his muse and model and as a portraitist, fashion photographer and Surrealist in her own right. She met Roland Penrose, another Surrealist artist, in 1937; they married ten years later. During the Second World War Miller acted as a combat photo-journalist, in which capacity she covered the Liberation of Paris as well as the liberation of Buchenwald and Dachau.

Miller and Penrose moved to Farleys with their son Antony, in 1949. The house quickly became a focal point for artists and writers from their circle, including Penrose's friend and biographical subject, Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), but also Max Ernst (1891-1976), Joan Miró (1893-1983), Man Ray and Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) and the British artists Kenneth Armitage (1916-2002), William Turnball (1922-2012) and Richard Hamilton (1922-2011). Farleys was also a home for the couple's extensive art collection, part of which was displayed in the specially created sculpture garden, alongside Miller's vegetable patches. After Miller and Penrose died, their son Antony opened the adjacent barn as a gallery for contemporary artists. Today, the house hosts the extensive Lee Miller archive, which includes some 60,000 negatives as well as manuscripts and ephemera. Access to Farleys, which is displayed much as the couple left it, is through guided tour only.