The Abduction of Psyche

Psyche thinks she is going to her death. In the story told by the Roman writer Apuleius, an oracle of Apollo orders her father to dress her as a bride and leave her alone on a mountain crag, to be taken by a monster that even the gods fear. Her family leads her up the mountain like a funeral procession and goes home. Then, instead of a monster, the gentle west wind lifts her, carries her down into a valley and lays her on soft grass, and she falls asleep. Her husband, it turns out, will be Cupid himself.

Prud'hon paints the flight. Psyche lies limp and asleep, her arm over her head, held up in the air by the Zephyrs, the winds, with small winged boys among them, and her pale body glows against a darkening sky. He showed the canvas at the Salon of 1808 and again in 1814. It was bought by Giovanni Battista Sommariva, the Italian collector living in Paris who gathered the most talked-about modern pictures of those years, and in 1824 the printmaker Aubry-Lecomte published a lithograph of it. The painting came to the Louvre by bequest in 1888.