Cupid Cutting His Bow from the Club of Hercules
Edme Bouchardon (1698-1762) · 1750
A gangling adolescent, wings on his back, concentrates on carving a bow out of a huge wooden club. The club belonged to Hercules, and the armour lying around the boy belonged to Mars: the god of love has disarmed the strongest hero and the god of war to make himself a weapon. Bouchardon gave Cupid the awkward proportions of a real teenager rather than the plump baby of tradition, and the naturalism was too much for the court. Look at the inscription on the strap of his quiver: by Edme Bouchardon of Chaumont in Bassigny, made in 1750.
The statue was commissioned in 1740 by Philibert Orry, the king's director of buildings, after a terracotta model shown at the Salon of 1739. The marble block arrived in 1747 and the sculptor worked on it until May 1750, when it was placed in the Salon of War at Versailles. Courtiers complained that the boy looked like a street porter, and in 1752 the statue was banished to the orangery at Choisy. It was brought to the Louvre in 1778 to be cast, and has stayed ever since. Pajou's Psyche beside it was made as its pendant.
Did You Know? Versailles found Cupid too much like a real boy and exiled the statue to an orangery within two years.
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