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Continuing my series looking at Les Nabis, I turn next to Félix Vallotton (1865–1925), a painter and print-maker whose work I thought I knew until I started to research what was going to be just one or two articles.

I then realised that to do him any justice at all would require a series of four or more – and that’s without considering his prints. I hope that you’ll agree by the end of this series that Vallotton was a key figure in the development of modern figurative painting in the twentieth century. And that his paintings are wonderful.

Félix Édouard Vallotton was born in Lausanne, in Switzerland, and moved to Paris in 1882 to study under Jules Joseph Lefebvre and Gustave Boulanger at the Académie Julian. His early influences included the paintings of Ingres, and he started painting portraits which followed the academic tradition.

Félix Vallotton (1865–1925), Self-portrait at…

By the start of the twentieth century, the former Nabi artist Maurice Denis (1870–1943) was firmly in the avant garde, his paintings evolving away from his earlier Nabi style, and making series of prints. He had started serious print-making around 1890, and had made woodblocks for music by Debussy. His prints became even more important in the early twentieth century, when he illustrated writings by an eclectic range of authors including Dante, Verlaine and Saint Francis of Assisi.

Maurice Denis (1870–1943), Boat to Saint Breton, or Portrait of Albert Clouard as a Saint (1903-06), oil on canvas, dimensions not known, Musée des beaux-arts de Morlaix, Morlaix, France. Wikimedia Commons.

Many of Denis’ themes remained religious, such as his Boat to Saint Breton, or Portrait of Albert Clouard as a Saint painted between 1903-06. This may refer to a legend of the life of the first Breton saint, canonised in…

Maurice Denis (1870–1943) was another of the founding members of the Nabis, and the youngest. To put his career into context, he was still an infant of three when the Impressionists held their first exhibition in Paris, and a member of the next and post-Impressionist generation.

A Norman by birth, he had hunble origins in the town of Granville, near the famous inshore island of Mont-Saint-Michel, on the north coast of France, but his family soon moved to Saint-Germain-en-Laye in the Paris suburbs. At the age of fifteen he decided that he wanted to combine his two interests and become a Christian painter. His major early influence came from the paintings of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.

Denis started on the road to realise his hopes when he gained entry to the Lycée Condorcet in Paris, presumably on a scholarship, and there he became friends with Édouard Vuillard and Ker-Xavier Roussel…

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…