penwithlit

Following my earlier long series on the paintings of Pierre Bonnard, and a brief look at those of Ker-Xavier Roussel, I seem to have accidentally started to look at the Nabis. Continuing this trend, this article and the next provide a short account of Édouard Vuillard (1868–1940), known to the group as Le Nabi Zouave.

Vuillard was born in 1868, in the town of Cuiseaux in eastern France, close to the border with Switzerland. His father was a retired Captain in the Army, which may have partly inspired his nickname. The Zouaves were crack infantry regiments first raised in North Africa, and before choosing to be an artist, Vuillard turned down a military career.

When he was ten years old, Vuillard and his family moved to Paris, and his father died six years later. His education was then funded by scholarship to the Lycée Condorcet, where he made…

On 27 February 1907, at Berggasse 19 in Vienna, Sigmund Freud fell in love. The object of his affection was Carl Gustav Jung: 19 years younger than Freud, the young psychiatrist was already the clinical director of the prestigious Burghölzli Hospital and a professor at the University of Zurich. Jung had gained international recognition for his invention of the word-association test, and his practice was renowned for its gentle incisiveness. But when Jung read Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), he was startled by Freud’s theory, and decided to go to talk with the man himself. And talk they did: for 13 hours, they plumbed the depths of the unconscious, the methods of psychoanalysis, and the analysis of dreams.

Freud was hugely impressed by Jung’s intellect, but his desire to sweep Jung into the psychoanalytic world was also politically motivated. As an intellectual movement, early psychoanalysis resembled a political party…

I’ve just turned 50 – woohoo! To celebrate arriving at such a grand old age, my family and I went to Iceland (the country, not the frozen food emporium – that would make for a very different post). Given that I’ve spent the past few years reading every Icelandic crime novel I can get my mitts on, and gazing daily, at Icelandic webcams, I was more than a little excited.

We spent a week there, the first few days Air B&Bing in Reykjavik, and then we hoped to head north for a few days depending on the weather. Luckily, we did manage to do that, although driving in the snowy north was pretty scary, and probably added a bit more ‘snow’ to the colour of my hair.

Anyway, here are some of my pics from our stay in the south.

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