Psyche Abandoned (David)

Psyche Abandoned is a c.1795 painting by Jacques-Louis David, and is now in a private collection. It shows Psyche abandoned by Cupid as a crouching female nude in profile against a blue sky and a hill in the background. Vertical in format, it represents David's early style and shows his approach to the female nude to be different from the academic canons.

"A painted study of Psyche" appears on three of David's lists of his own work as a pendant to The Vestal Virgin.^[1] Long thought lost, it was rediscovered in 1991^[2] and exhibited in the 2010 Louvre exhibition L’Antiquité rêvée.^[3]

References

1. ↑ One is the list of 1789 cited in (Verbraeken 1973, p. 245)
2. ↑ Antoine Schnapper, "Après l'exposition David. La «Psyché» retrouvée", Revue de l'Art, 1991, p. 60-67
3. ↑ Guilhem Scherf (ed), "L’Antiquité rêvée, innovations et résistances au XVIIIe siècle", Louvre éditions and Gallimard, 2010, (ISBN 9782070130887)

Bibliography

• René Verbraeken, Jacques-Louis David jugé par ses contemporains et la postérité, Paris, Léonce Laget, 1973 (ISBN 2852040018)

Jacques-Louis David Works Portrait of François Buron (1769) Minerva Fighting Mars (1771) Diana and Apollo Killing Niobe's Children (1772) The Death of Seneca (1773) Erasistratus Discovering the Cause of Antiochus' Disease (1774) The Funeral Games of Patroclus (1778) Portrait of Count Stanislas Potocki (1780) Belisarius Begging for Alms (1781) Christ on the Cross (1782) Oath of the Horatii (1784) The Death of Socrates (1787) Portrait of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and his wife (1788) The Loves of Paris and Helen (1788) The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons (1789) The Death of Marat (1793) Self-portrait (1794) Psyche Abandoned (1795) The Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799) Portrait of Madame Récamier (1800) Napoleon at the Saint-Bernard Pass (1800-1805) Portrait of Pope Pius VII (1805) The Coronation of Napoleon (1807) Leonidas at Thermopylae (1814) Napoleon in His Study (1812) Mars Being Disarmed by Venus (1824)