Psyche Abandoned
Augustin Pajou (1730-1809) · 1790
A naked young woman sits on a rock, her head bowed, one hand raised to her face in despair. She is Psyche at the moment after her fall: forbidden to look at her mysterious lover, she has lit a lamp while he slept, discovered that he was Cupid himself, and watched him fly away. The inscription on the plinth spells out the moral in French: Psyche lost Love by wanting to know him. Pajou, the leading sculptor of his generation, treats the nude with a smooth, cool perfection that looks back to antique statues, and the sorrow is all in the pose.
The statue was commissioned in 1783 by the Count of Angiviller, director of the king's buildings, as a companion to Bouchardon's Cupid nearby. When the plaster model appeared at the Salon of 1785 its frank nudity caused such a scandal that it was withdrawn and shown instead in the sculptor's studio. The marble was finished in 1790 and exhibited at the Salon of 1791; look at the signature, where the words sculptor to the king have been hammered out and replaced by citizen of Paris. It entered the Louvre from the Luxembourg palace in 1829.
Did You Know? The sculptor chiselled away the words sculptor to the king from his own signature during the Revolution and called himself citizen of Paris instead.
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