L'Amour et Psyché

The love of Cupid and Psyche — the myth of the god of love and the mortal girl whose beauty rivalled Venus's — was one of the most richly developed subjects in Natoire's mythological production. Charles Joseph Natoire painted this version in 1737, now in the Museum Kunsthaus Heylshof in Worms, as part of his sustained engagement with the Psyche narrative that included the celebrated Hôtel de Soubise cycle. The Worms museum, housed in a nineteenth-century villa, holds a collection emphasising Flemish, Dutch, and German painting with selective French additions. Natoire's treatment of the sleeping Cupid visited by Psyche — or the moment of their tenderness before the breaking of the taboo — allows him to combine two beautiful figures, divine and mortal, in an intimate nocturnal or private setting. The Apuleius source text, rediscovered in the Renaissance, was well known to educated European audiences.

The intimate subject allows Natoire to reduce the compositional scale from his multi-figure mythologies to two figures in close proximity, requiring him to focus on the emotional and physical relationship between the bodies. The handling is warm and delicate, with the contrast between Cupid's divine golden light and Psyche's mortal beauty achieved through tonal and colour differentiation. Draperies are minimised in favour of the figures.