Nymph and Eros

In the Munich of the 1890s, mythology was the going current among the painters around Gyzis. Franz von Stuck and Arnold Böcklin were filling canvases with fauns, centaurs and nymphs, and the decorative style soon named Jugendstil was taking shape in the same studios and magazines. Gyzis, who had spent his whole career in that city, painted his own versions of the cast: nymphs, satyrs, small winged cupids.

This one carries the date 1897 and is modest in size, 85 by 59 centimetres. The gallery shows it in the part of the permanent display given over to symbolism and allegory, the direction he took after the mid-1880s and kept developing to the end of his life.

Its title travels in two forms, Nymph and Eros in Athens and Nymph and Cupid in catalogues abroad, the Greek name and the Roman one for the same winged boy.