Cupid and Psyche

Cupid, his bow fallen, bends to the sleeping Psyche as her lamp burns beside them — the moment from Apuleius’s Golden Ass when the god of love, who visited his bride only in darkness, is revealed by her stolen glance and, though wounded, lifts her to Olympus. Jean Baptiste Regnault, the Neoclassical painter who rivalled David in Revolutionary Paris and won the Prix de Rome in 1776, signed and dated this luminous canvas 1828, the last year of his life; its cool daylight, sculptural figures and tender tone belong to the refined late phase of French mythological painting. The picture was exhibited in Paris in 1846, passed from the artist’s atelier sale of 1830 through a private Paris collection, and was sold by Wildenstein to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1972. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.