Psyche and Love

Bouguereau painted this in 1889, the year Paris raised the Eiffel Tower over the World's Fair and the newest painters were pushing toward Impressionism. He went the other way, back to an old Greek story. Psyche was a mortal princess whose name means soul, loved by Cupid, the god of desire. Here Cupid lifts her up into the air, and the butterfly wings on her shoulders are the old sign of the soul in flight. Bouguereau worked the surface until the brush disappears, skin and cloud settling into one smooth light. He was near the height of his fame in 1889, and this tall canvas, about two metres high, eventually travelled to the far side of the world, to a museum in Hobart, in Tasmania.