Cupid Delivering Psyche

Cupid Delivering Psyche (1870) belongs to Burne-Jones's sustained engagement with the myth of Cupid and Psyche drawn from Apuleius's The Golden Ass, a narrative he returned to repeatedly culminating in his major series of the 1870s–1880s. In this moment of the myth, Cupid delivers the sleeping Psyche to safety, carrying her through the air in an act that combines divine power with protecting love. The Sheffield Galleries and Museums Trust preserves this canvas from Burne-Jones's developing mature phase. The Cupid-and-Psyche myth attracted him because it dramatized the soul's journey toward divine love through trials of faith and endurance—a theme with both classical and implicitly Christian resonances congenial to the Victorian religious imagination. By 1870 he had made his transformative second Italian journey in 1862 and was beginning to produce the large-scale oils that would define his mature career.

Oil on canvas with the careful figure construction of Burne-Jones's early maturity. The airborne subject required inventive compositional handling to convey weightlessness convincingly; the drapery and figure arrangement work together to suggest effortless flight without the mechanical quality of less accomplished treatments.