A stunning and surprising re-evaluation of Freud's life and legacy told through his extraordinary art collection.
Janine Burke, award-winning author and art historian, reveals an intriguing new perspective on sigmund Freud - as an obsessive artcollector; a passionate and reckless man intent on surrounding himself with beautiful objects.
Sigmund Freud's collection of Egyptian, Greek and Roman antiquities must be one of the world's best-kept secrets. Over a 40-year period he amassed an extraordinary array of nearly three thousand statues, vases, reliefs, busts,fragments of papyrus, rings, precious stones and prints. For Freud, psychoanalysis and his art collection developed together in a symbiotic relationship, each informing and enriching the other.
To create a portrait of Freud the art collector, Janine Burke builds a vibrant, richly detailed and intimate image of his life and times, set against the glittering, decadent background of fin-de-siècle Vienna where an artistic flowering took place in painting, theatre, writing and architecture.

Janine Burke is the award-winning author of fifteen books of art history, biography and fiction. Between 1977 and 1982, she lectured in art history at the Victorian College of the Arts before resigning to write full time. She has degrees in art history from the University of Melbourne, La Trobe University and Deakin University. She has written extensively on the Heide Circle, including Joy Hester, Dear Sun: The Letters of Joy Hester and Sunday Reed and The Eye of the Beholder: Albert Tucker's Photographs. Australian Gothic, her acclaimed biography of Tucker, was published by Knopf in 2002 and the final book in the Heide quartet, The Heart Garden, a biography of Sunday Reed. She has lectured extensively on art, curated exhibitions, written for newspapers and journals and acted as a consultant to films and documentaries.