Venus and Cupid

In this work, Venus the Roman goddess of beauty and fertility has just emerged from her fountain bath attended by Cupid, the winged god of erotic love. The Venus figure is loosely based on an 18th Century Francois Boucher drawing of a woman washing. Cupid has been referenced from Rubens’ ‘The Judgment of Paris’ (c.1608). Rubens’s twisting Cupid and rich painterly style provide an element of visual tension, and a dramatic contrast to the sketched, translucent washes of the ethereal figure-ground.