1813
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Dominant colour
Cupid and Psyche is a 1813 by Jacques-Louis David, a Romanticism work, depicting Clothed Male, Naked Female, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a naked Cupid leaning over Psyche, who’s asleep on a rock, her body curled like a question mark. This is a rehearsal drawing—David worked out the whole scene in gray wash before he touched oil. The loose charcoal lines show where he changed his mind; the final painting kept almost everything else. If you like how light and shadow shape the figures, look up *chiaroscuro*.
This drawing belongs to a group of preparatory studies for Jacques-Louis David's painting Cupid and Psyche, also in the Cleveland Museum of Art's collection. Here, David integrated looser charcoal sketches into a finished work in which his composition was fully established. Only minor details, such as Cupid's facial expression, were ultimately changed. In layers of diluted gray wash and outlines of black ink, David evoked the precise appearance of his final canvas using monochromatic media.
Scholars believe that this drawing was given by Jacques-Louis David to his pupil, the Comte de Forbin, to thank him for his continual devotion.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Jacques-Louis David was born in Paris on 30 August 1748 into a bourgeois family; his father died in a duel when the boy was nine, and a maternal uncle guided his education.
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