Some interesting excerpts from a lengthy piece in the Sydney Morning Herald about Freud and Vienna:

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Unlike the leisurely, pleasure-loving Viennese who considered it ill-mannered to rush, Freud stormed around the Ring's six-kilometre length at such a cracking pace that it reminded Martin, his eldest son, of a soldier. Passing Freud on his daily walks was Adolf Hitler, a young artist of meagre talent, embittered by his failure to study at the Vienna Academy of Art. Hitler spent his days wandering the Ring because it had "a magic effect upon me, as if it were a scene from The Thousand and One Nights". The Ring's windswept plazas can be inhuman places, dwarfing the individual. No wonder Hitler admired them: his taste for triumphalist architecture was nurtured there.

Freud's regular destination was the Kunsthistorisches Museum, where he viewed its treasure trove of Egyptian, Greek and Roman art. Then he bustled back through the Inner Stadt, the labyrinth of medieval streets at Vienna's heart, where he stocked up on cigars and surveyed the shops of antiquities' dealers. If he saw an item he desired, some brisk bargaining took place, then Freud hurried home with a new prize - perhaps mummy bandages from an Egyptian tomb or an elegant Greek vase depicting Oedipus and the Sphinx or a Roman intaglio ring. At Berggasse 19, Freud would sit gazing at his new toy, before carefully arranging it alongside the others in his collection. By 1938, Freud was the proud owner of more than 2000 antiquities. "I must always have an object to love," he told Carl Jung.

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While writing The Interpretation of Dreams in the last years of the 19th century, Freud developed another passion - an obsession with antiquity, myth and archeology that lead him to amass a private museum of statues, vases, reliefs, busts, fragments of papyrus, rings, precious stones and prints. When he fled Vienna for London in 1938, Freud, near death from cancer, declared "a collection to which there are no new additions is really dead". Patients were stunned when ushered into his rooms at Berggasse 19. Sergei Pankejeff, the "Wolf Man", felt he was not in a doctor's office but an archeologist's study surrounded by "all kinds of statuettes and other unusual objects, which even the layman recognised as archeological finds from ancient Egypt". For Pankejeff, the art works from "long-vanished epochs" created a sense of sanctuary, a "feeling of sacred peace and quiet."

Today Freud's magnificent collection is on view at the Freud Museum London (20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead), the house where Freud died in 1939. Freud's apartment at Berggasse 19 is also a museum. When it opened in 1971, Anna, Freud's youngest daughter and a pioneer of child psychoanalysis, donated a selection of Freud's art works, as well as original furniture from his waiting room.

Freud was a tomb raider, complicit in the often illegal trade in antiquities that accompanied the grand era of archeological discoveries. Freud did not care how he acquired his antiquities nor was he averse to trading on the black market. "For I am actually not a man of science" he wrote, "not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador - an adventurer, if you want it translated - with all the curiosity, daring and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort." He eagerly followed the latest archeological discoveries, such as Arthur Evans' discovery of Minos on Crete. His hero was Heinrich Schliemann, who in 1871 had discovered the site of Troy.

Antiquities were relatively cheap and Freud did not need much cash to buy up big. Robert Lustig, his favourite dealer, was visiting a junk shop in the countryside near Vienna, when he saw a bronze Egyptian statuette. When he asked the price, the shop owner put the statue on the scale to weigh it and Lustig bought it for the price of the metal. Isis suckling the infant Horus (Egyptian, Late Period, 664-525 BC, Freud Museum London) is one of the main works in Freud's collection. Though the devotional image of Isis as madonna was popular in Egyptian art and similar statues can be seen in many galleries, including the Kunsthistorisches Museum and the National Gallery of Victoria, Freud's example is better. Not for the first time, Freud had gained a first class, museum-standard work.

Vienna has an archeological past. A Roman colony, founded in 14 BC and named Vindobona, it was the last outpost before the barbarian territories of the north. The Romans built a large fort in central Vienna. Today, in Michaelerplatz, excavated ruins show the walls of Roman houses. Marcus Aurelius arrived in 180 AD to battle the Teutons and died there from the plague, making Freud remark that in death the emperor "became a Viennese". It was the civilising influence of the Romans that brought winemaking to the region. Vienna is Wien - wine.

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I'm sure most folks have seen bits and pieces of Freud's collection before ... if not, here's a useful 'summary'.