In the summer of 1878 the Grosvenor Gallery in New Bond Street held its second exhibition, and among the pictures on its silk-hung walls was a small watercolour by John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, Cupid and Psyche, number 171. The Grosvenor had opened the year before as the gallery of the Aesthetic movement, the place where Burne-Jones, Whistler and their circle could show outside the Royal Academy, and Stanhope was one of its natural exhibitors. He had shown his largest and best-known picture, Love and the Maiden (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco), in the opening exhibition of 1877; the present sheet, exhibited the following season, treats openly the myth that the larger picture had only half disclosed.

That myth is the tale of Cupid and Psyche, told by Apuleius in the Metamorphoses and, for Stanhope’s generation, retold by William Morris. Morris had written his version, The Story of Cupid and Psyche, by 1865, and it appeared in The Earthly Paradise between 1868 and 1870; Burne-Jones designed nearly seventy woodblock illustrations for the projected edition, the most sustained engagement any of the Pre-Raphaelite circle made with a classical subject. Stanhope stood at the centre of that enthusiasm. He had painted alongside Burne-Jones on the Oxford Union murals in 1857, by his own account passing most days at the younger man’s side, and the two shared the devotion to Botticelli that John Ruskin and Walter Pater were then making fashionable. He returned to the Psyche in other works including The Labours of Psyche(1873) and Charon and Psyche (1883), which carried a line of Morris on its frame.

The subject is the opening of the tale. Venus, affronted that a mortal should be worshipped for a beauty rivalling her own, has sent Cupid to pierce Psyche with an arrow and condemn her to love some worthless creature; he will instead wound himself and fall in love with her, but that reversal is still to come, and Stanhope has chosen the moment before it. Psyche stands at an open window in a coral bodice and gold mantle, her chin resting on her hand, looking out at an orange tree and distant landscape. Cupid comes up the steps barefoot, his rose-pink wings raised, in his left hand he holds the bow and the arrow together, lowered for the moment. Unlike us the spectator, Pysche has not seen the god enter behind her.

A pillar and a hanging curtain split the composition down the middle, dividing the lit window from the shadowed corridor and Psyche’s side of the room from Cupid’s. The two share the space without meeting: she looks out, he steps in, and only the spectator sees the two of them together. The effect is faintly voyeuristic, for we watch the wound being prepared while its object stands lost in thought. Stanhope used the a similar compositional arrangement in his 1863 painting, Juliet and the Nurse.

For so small a sheet the surface is remarkably dense. Stanhope has built the picture up in pencil, watercolour and bodycolour, with gum arabic and gold worked over the whole. The gum darkens the shadows and leaves a faint lacquer on the surface; the gold picks out the pomegranates in the curtain, the moulding above the columns, and the bow. He had learnt the technique from Burne-Jones, whose heavily worked bodycolour drawings of the 1860s achieve the same end. The colour is kept to a few strong chords. Coral and gold used for the two figures and the curtain; a cold blue holds the interior walls and tiled floor; a band of green runs down the corridor between them. The furnishings are real ones. The embroidered curtain derives from the early hangings of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Company, and the floor is tiled in the blue that William De Morgan was firing in these years, the blue he would supply for Leighton’s Arab Hall. Stanhope has furnished Psyche’s palace from an Aesthetic drawing-room.

The orange tree in fruit, framed in the window, is an old emblem of love and marriage, and stands for what the arrow is about to bring. Cupid enters through a drawn curtain, the literal threshold of the room and the figurative one between Psyche’s present calm and the passion that will end it. None of this is forced. Stanhope keeps his symbols among the ordinary objects of a room one could walk into, much as the early Florentine painters had done, so that the allegory never overrides the domestic scene that carries it.

The early ownership places the watercolour among the serious collectors of Aesthetic painting. Its first recorded owner was the 1st Earl of Wharncliffe, a friend of Millais who had commissioned Poynter to paint a scheme of pictures for the billiard room of Wortley Hall near Sheffield; the house was bombed in the Second World War and that scheme lost. From Wharncliffe the sheet passed to William Hesketh Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme, the soap magnate whose collection at Port Sunlight became the Lady Lever Art Gallery, and it was sold from his estate at the Anderson Galleries in New York in 1926.

Cupid and Psyche dates from the last of Stanhope’s English years. In 1880 he left for Florence, where he had owned the Villa Nuti since 1873, and there he remained until his death, painting in fresco and tempera among the early masters he had until then known chiefly through Burne-Jones and through his own visits to the Uffizi. The painting is among the most fully realised of his treatments of the Psyche story, and a characteristic example of the Aesthetic movement at the Grosvenor in its first years: a classical subject drawn from Morris, handled in the dense gold-heightened bodycolour of Burne-Jones, and set in an interior furnished from the workshops of Morris and De Morgan.