Theodor Von HOLST (1820-1844)
Cupid and Psyche
oil on canvas
52 x 39 inches, inc. frame
Price: Sold
Theodor Von Holst was the son of a Latvian music master who settled in London in 1807. In the 1820s he became a pupil of Henry Fuseli (1741-1825), and like him specialised in literary subjects with an emphasis on the macabre and supernatural.
Holst occupies a unique position in the history of British Romantic Art between his vivacious and eccentric master Fuseli and his most important admirer Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882). Together Holst and Rossetti form an artistic bridge from the art of the Regency to that of the Symbolists and the Aesthetic Movement at the end of the 19th Century and beyond. However the nature of their extraordinary romantic output appealed to the connoisseur rather than the public: a cultural difference that both artists had to grapple with throughout their careers.
As part of his contribution to Gilchrist’s Life of William Blake (1863), Rossetti praised Holst and described him ‘as a link of some consequence’ between the earlier generation of history painters and the Pre-Raphaelite circle, who frequented a particular West End restaurant because it was hung with Holst’s pictures. Rossetti’s first widely published poem The Card-Player was based on ‘The Wish’ painted by Holst in 1841.
Unfortunately the fantastic, supernatural and erotic content of Holst’s art precluded favour with the increasingly bourgeois London public of the 1830s and 40s despite the high praise bestowed on him by his peers. The Tate’s ground-breaking ‘Gothic Nightmares’ exhibition in 2006 presented Holst, at last, as a significant figure in British Romantic art, along with Fuseli, Blake and Gillray. Their Pre-Raphaelites exhibition in 2012 showed the side of Holst that most appealed to these ‘desperate romantics’ by focusing on his most popular painting, The Bride of 1842.
The present work seems to relate to the legend of Cupid and Psyche. The god Cupid is enraptured by the beautiful mortal Psyche and makes love to her in his palace at night so as to hide his true identity. The following evening Psyche secretly creeps into her lover’s bedchamber where she finds him asleep. However, Cupid is awoken by a drop of oil which spills from her lamp. Enraged he flies away and it is only after a series of arduous trials that the lovers are reunited.