Cupid and Psyche

In 1817 two French painters, in two different countries, chose the same moment from the same story. In the tale told by the Roman writer Apuleius, Cupid visits Psyche only in darkness, forbids her to look at him, and leaves before daylight. Jacques-Louis David, in exile in Brussels, painted the god getting out of bed with a knowing grin, a gawky adolescent. In Rome the young François-Édouard Picot painted his own version and signed it at lower right, Picot. Rome. 1817.

Picot's Cupid is everything David's is not, a slender, smooth-limbed youth with spread wings who steps away on tiptoe so as not to wake her, one arm raised to the heavy red curtain. Psyche lies asleep on the bed behind him, and beyond the columns the light is just coming up. The canvas is almost three metres wide.

It was shown at the Salon of 1819 in Paris and was given to the Louvre in 1927. It hangs in the Salle Daru among the Neoclassical pictures, in the same room as Prud'hon's painting of Psyche being carried off by the winds.