On 28 July, admission tickets to the Freud Museum London at 20 Maresfield Gardens included a celebration of 40 years to the day since the Freud Museum opened to the public in 1986.
During the afternoon, visitors, members, volunteers, patrons and the project team were given an exclusive anniversary tour and a special conversation with Lord David Freud, the great-grandson of Sigmund Freud. There was also a lovely drinks reception in the museum garden. The anniversary cake for everyone would have delighted the Freuds, coming from cake-famous Vienna!
Why Sigmund Freud and his daughter Anna Freud are Remembered
On one of the helpful boards in the museum, it explains that neurologist and professor Sigmund Freud is well-known for his theory “that human behaviour is determined by unconscious motivations that stem from childhood experience as well as complex emotional attitudes to parents and siblings.” Freud is famous because he used dialogue to help his patients explore the impact of the unconscious on their lives. He is accredited as the founder of psychoanalysis. Anna Freud, a pioneering child psychoanalyst, lived in the house for forty years, whereas her father only had about a year in the house before he died.
20 Maresfield Gardens
The Freud Museum is the final home of Sigmund Freud and his family, when they moved to London in 1938, fleeing Nazi persecution in Vienna and across mainland Europe. Many aspects of the house have been kept as Freud left them, namely his study, which includes his desk and his psychoanalytic couch. The Museum houses over 2,500 antiquities once belonging to Sigmund and his daughter Anna Freud, as well as collections from other notable psychoanalytic figures.
Photo by Orion Turner
My Favourite Rooms in The Freud Museum
Upstairs in the Anna Freud room, there are many of her personal belongings from Vienna and London, as well as her analytic couch and one of her looms. Anna was a keen weaver and believed that for balance, an intellectual mind needs a creative outlet. Sharing her father’s interest in antiquities and classical mythology, Anna was apparently nicknamed ‘My Anna Antigone’ by Sigmund Freud.
The museum also remembers child psychoanalyst Dorothy Burlingham who was Anna’s life-long friend and together they co-founded the Hampstead War Nurseries (1941) and co-authored Infants without Families (1943). The two women have their ashes side by side in the Freud family corner of Golders Green Crematorium.
The house’s half landing has a nostalgic atmosphere. It was here that Sigmund’s wife Martha and her sister would take tea and do needlework. One of the plants on the windowsill is a begonia, descended from a cutting of a plant which originally belonged to Sigmund. He had given the cutting to a friend and decades later, it was donated to the museum.
A tour around The Freud Museum should include a browse in the gift shop! Along with many classic and modern books, there’s quite a range of small and big gifts. There’s also a new range of Portia Graves’ cards, tote bags and beautifully illustrated trays. The gift shop is adjacent to the tranquil garden and both add to the museum’s remarkableness.
Leonora Carrington: The Symptomatic Surreal Exhibition
Good news for those who haven’t yet seen the art exhibition at The Freud Museum – Leonora Carrington: The Symptomatic Surreal. It’s being extended and will be open to the public until 10 August 2026. The exhibition brings together sketches and paintings which reveal Leonora Carrington’s fascination with surrealism and the underworld.
At the start of the World War II, the British-born Mexican artist Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) had a crisis and was hospitalised in a sanatorium in Santander for four months. She later described this period as being “down below” and with little access to art materials, Carrington sketched in pencil. The exhibition follows Carrington’s flight from France and arrival in New York via Spain and Portugal.
The Freud Museum has been given the exclusive right to display Villa Pilar (1940) a never-before-exhibited painting by Leonora Carrington.
Leonora Carrington, Villa Pilar, 1940. Image courtesy of Faro Santander ©2026 Estate of Leonora Carrington ARS, NY and DACS, London
Freud Museum London, 20 Maresfield Gardens, NW3 is open from Wednesdays – Sundays.
For further information and to book tickets, visit: www.freud.org.uk
Cover Photo: Courtesy of the Freud Museum London
