Cupid Crowned by Psyche

Greuze painted Cupid Crowned by Psyche around 1787, a late mythological subject that extended his female head studies into a fully allegorical composition. The work shows the evolution of his style away from the bourgeois domestic genre that had made his reputation toward the more explicitly sensuous mythological subjects of his final decades — a commercial response to the changing taste of the period that was moving away from the moralizing domestic genre toward the Neoclassical classical subjects. Psyche crowning the sleeping Cupid with a garland is a subject of erotic tenderness that occupies the meeting point between Greuze's sensuous female heads and the mythological painting of his younger contemporaries.

Greuze renders the two figures with the luminous flesh tones and tender expressions characteristic of his style. The intimate scale and warm palette are more reminiscent of his genre work than the grand manner expected of mythological subjects.