Psyche Showing her Sisters her Gifts from Cupid by Jean Honore Fragonard was created in 1753. The painting is in National Gallery London. The size of the work is 168,3 x 192,4 cm and is made of oil on canvas.
About the Work
This painting illustrates an episode from the classical story of Cupid and Psyche. Having fallen in love with Psyche, Cupid only visited her at night, forbidding her to look at him. Here we see Psyche welcoming her two sisters into Cupid’s palace where she shows them the gifts she has received. Provoked by envy – represented by an allegorical figure above them who is clutching snakes – the two sisters persuade Psyche to reveal Cupid’s identity and thereby destroy her happiness.
The story was originally told by Apuleius (c.124–c.170 AD) in Book V: 7–10 of his Latin prose work Metamorphoses (also known as The Golden Ass). However, Fragonard’s painting – particularly the abundance of figures and objects – owes more to Jean de La Fontaine’s Les Amours de Psiché et Cupidon, which was first published in 1669 and frequently republished.
Some detail is now missing as the canvas has been cut down – it has lost around 26 cm from the top and around 35 cm on the left hand side. In what would originally have been the middle of the picture, the two sisters stand flanked by the giant columns of Cupid’s palace. On the right, Psyche, swathed in white, reclines as she is attended to by two nymphs, one of whom dresses her hair. Three more nymphs are on the left. Two are holding the fabrics that Psyche is showing to her sisters. Part of another (sixth) nymph can just be glimpsed at the very left edge of the picture. Read more in National Gallery London.
About the Artist
Jean-Honoré Fragonard (5 April 1732 – 22 August 1806) was a French painter and printmaker whose late Rococo manner was distinguished by remarkable facility, exuberance, and hedonism. One of the most prolific artists active in the last decades of the Ancien Régime, Fragonard produced more than 550 paintings (not counting drawings and etchings), of which only five are dated. Among his most popular works are genre paintings conveying an atmosphere of intimacy and veiled eroticism.
Jean-Honoré Fragonard was born in Grasse, Alpes-Maritimes, France the only child of François Fragonard, a glover, and Françoise Petit. Fragonard was apprenticed to a Paris notary when his father’s circumstances became strained through unsuccessful speculations, but showed such talent and inclination for art that he was taken at the age of eighteen to François Boucher. Boucher recognized the youth’s rare gifts but, disinclined to waste his time with one so inexperienced, sent him to Chardin’s atelier. Fragonard studied for a short time with Chardin then returned more fully equipped to Boucher, whose style he soon acquired so completely that the master entrusted him with the execution of replicas of his paintings. Read more in Wikipedia.
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