LAURENT-HONORÉ MARQUESTE | CUPID AND PSYCHE

Sale: Sotheby's, London, December 14, 2016, lot 63, illustrated

Acquired at the above sale

Laurent Marqueste studied under François Jouffroy and Alexandre Falguière at the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris and won the Prix de Rome in 1871. He began exhibiting at the Salon in 1874, and won many prizes throughout the last decades of the nineteenth century, including a gold medal at the Exposition Universelle of 1889. In 1884, he was named Officer of the  Légion d'honneur. Marqueste worked on several distinguished commissions across Paris, including a monument to Pierre Waldeck-Rousseu (1846-1904) for the gardens of the Tuileries, and sculptures for the façades of the Sorbonne and the Musée d'Orsay. His works were often rooted in allegorical or mythological subjects, and produced in plaster or marble. The present group epitomizes his interest in mythology, and shows the famous pair in a fresh and newly imagined composition, as Cupid lifts a seemingly weightless Psyche above him.