After the wartime horrors she witnessed, the photographer – now the subject of a biopic, Lee, starring Kate Winslet – settled into life at Farleys, an art-filled farmhouse in East Sussex. "Farleys gave her the incentive to heal herself," her son Antony Penrose tells the BBC. Something feels familiar about the uneven features of the smiling face painted on a tile above the kitchen range.
Then my guide confirms: the tile is a Picasso. This historically fat-splashed artwork, at Farleys Farmhouse in East Sussex, speaks of frivolity, hospitality and famous friendships. All are relevant to the life lived here by Vogue-model-turned-war-photographer Lee Miller and her Surrealist artist husband Roland Penrose.
Yet there is a deeper story. Suffering from PTSD, and increasingly alcohol reliant, Miller slowly rebuilt herself there after reporting from the frontline and death camps of World War Two. That's an experience portrayed by Kate Winslet in Lee , the newly-released biopic that the star also co-produced.
"It was quite crude to begin with," Antony Penrose explains of Farleys, which his parents bought in 1949. "For the first six to eight years, there was no heating. Water was from a well and looked like tomato soup because of the iron.
" Miller threw herself into renovating the creaky 18th-Century buildings, and supplementing friends' post-war rations with food grown and raised on the farm at Muddles Green near Chiddingly. She later became a gourmet cook, hosting notable friends (.