Young Greek Maidens Adorning Sleeping Cupid with Flowers

At the Salon of 1773 Vien showed this canvas as number six in the catalogue, one chapter of a four-part story he had just painted for a pavilion at Louveciennes. The set was called The Progress of Love in the Hearts of Young Girls, and it reads like a sequence of scenes. Two Greek girls swear they will never love. Here they come upon Cupid asleep in a garden and deck him with flowers. Then a lover crowns his mistress, and at last the pair go to the altar of Hymen, the god of marriage.

The humour is gentle. Cupid sleeps on a blue cloth with his bow laid down beside him, harmless for the moment, while the young women dangle garlands and scatter roses over the very god they had sworn to keep away from. Ten years earlier Vien had shown little cupids offered for sale from a basket, in a picture taken from an ancient Roman wall painting. Here the god himself has become the plaything.

The four canvases did not stay together. Two of them are in the Louvre, and the other two, the vow and the wedding, were long ago deposited at the prefecture in Chambéry, in Savoy.