Flight of Love

Flight of Love from 1901, now in the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, depicts Cupid or Eros in the act of flight — a winged figure of love escaping or departing. The Frye Art Museum, which specialises in nineteenth-century academic European painting, holds Flight of Love as part of its foundational collection built by Charles and Emma Frye. Bouguereau's many paintings of Cupid and winged love figures draw on the long tradition of Rococo and Neoclassical playful allegory, but filtered through his meticulous academic naturalism — the wings are anatomically studied, the figure carefully modelled, the flight depicted with genuine sense of upward motion.

The flying figure required Bouguereau to handle foreshortening and the implied motion of outstretched wings, departing from the stable, grounded poses of most of his subjects. The wings are rendered with careful attention to feather structure and the way light plays across the overlapping layers of plumage from root to tip.