Cupid and Psyche

Reynolds's Cupid and Psyche from 1789, now in the Courtauld Gallery, is one of his late mythological works that placed the familiar classical narrative — the beautiful mortal girl whose curiosity about her divine husband's identity leads to her loss and eventual divine apotheosis — in the tradition of the erotic mythological subject that Reynolds had long admired in Titian and Correggio. The 1789 date makes this a late work, painted when Reynolds's eyesight was deteriorating and his technique becoming more broadly handled; the Cupid and Psyche subject gave him material for exploring the mythological nude in a way that his English portrait practice rarely permitted. The Courtauld Gallery, which holds some of the greatest French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works alongside strong earlier collections, preserves this late Reynolds as evidence of his ambitions beyond portraiture — the history and mythology paintings that he argued in his Discourses should be the highest aim of any painter trained in the grand manner but that his market in portrait-hungry Georgian Britain rarely allowed him to pursue.

Reynolds renders the mythological scene with characteristic warmth, the sleeping Psyche's flesh tones glowing against the dark background. The late technique, somewhat broader than his earlier work, maintains the sensuous appeal appropriate to the subject while showing the effects of his declining vision.