Adolescent Cupid weeping over the portrait of Psyche whom he has lost

Charles Meynier, a pupil of François-André Vincent, was one of the outstanding neoclassical decorators of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in France. In the fateful year of 1789 he shared the Prix de Rome with Anne-Louis Girodet, but was forced by the Revolution to cut off his studies and return to France early. In France, Meynier regularly exhibited at the Salon, becoming well known as a painter of classical histories, mythologies and Napoleonic themes. Meynier's easy, richly colored style for which he drew on a Greco-Roman vocabulary was readily employed in large-scale decorative projects under the Empire and the first Restoration. He provided designs for the sculpted bas-reliefs and statues of the Arc de Triomphe du Carousel in 1806, and he painted vast ceilings in the Tuileries and the Louvre, where he executed four major decorative cycles. Meynier was elected as a member of the Institut in 1815 and Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur in 1825.

Isabelle Mayer-Michalon has identified the present lot as a highly finished modello for the large painting of the Adolescent Cupid weeping over a portrait of Psyche whom he has lost, now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Quimper (see the exhibition catalogue, La vie en France autour de 1789: Images et représentations 1785-1795, Château de Biron, Dordogne and Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nancy, 1989, cat. no. 50, illustrated in color p. 24). An otherworldly masterpiece of marmoreal flesh and androgenous sensuality, the finished painting (which measures 153 x 202 cm.) was exhibited by Meynier in his first Paris Salon in 1795 (no. 368). Nevertheless, it had been painted in Rome three years earlier and it is reasonably assumed that the present lot was also painted in 1792, in immediate preparation for its execution.

The present work will be included in Isabelle Mayer-Michalon's forthcoming catalogue raisonné of paintings by Meynier.