Cupid and Psyche

Venus, jealous of the mortal Psyche whose beauty had been likened to her own, sent her son Cupid to punish her — but the god fell in love instead, visiting Psyche only by night and in disguise until her sisters betrayed his secret and she was made to endure a series of trials before the lovers were at last reunited. Lagrenée takes the story from Apuleius’s Metamorphoses and gives it a soft, luminous telling, the pale figure of Psyche set among draperies and the dim architecture of a classical interior: the grand goût of the French Academy, warmed by the Rococo. Lagrenée, who would go on to direct the French Academy in Rome, was among the painters who carried that academic manner through the middle of the eighteenth century. The canvas is signed and dated 1767. The painting is held in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.