Love and Psyche or Cupid and Psyche is an 1817 painting by Jacques-Louis David, now in the Cleveland Museum of Art. It shows Cupid and Psyche. It was produced during David's exile in Brussels, for the patron and collector Gian Battista Sommariva. On its first exhibition at the museum in Brussels, it surprised viewers with its realist treatment of the figure of Cupid. Critics generally saw the painting's unconventional style and realistic depiction of Cupid as proof of David's decline while in exile, but art historians have come to see the work as a deliberate departure from traditional methods of representing mythological figures.
Love and Psyche (David)
Gerard Cupid and Psyche (1798)
Picot, Amor and Psyche (1817)
Titian Venus of Urbino (1538): Example of Recumbent Goddess
Jacques-Louis David was a French painter in the Neoclassical style, considered to be the preeminent painter of the era. In the 1780s, his cerebral brand of history painting marked a change in taste away from Rococo frivolity toward classical austerity, severity, and heightened feeling, which harmonized with the moral climate of the final years of the Ancien Régime.
Self-Portrait, 1794 (Musée du Louvre)
Portrait of David as a youth, c. 1765, by his tutor Joseph-Marie Vien
Mademoiselle Guimard as Terpsichore, 1774–1775, an early work
Equestrian portrait of Stanisław Kostka Potocki (1781)