Education of Cupid

Narcisse Virgile Diaz de la Peña · c. 1859

Medium

Oil on panel

Original size

37.8 × 24.6 cm (14 7/8 × 9 11/16 in.); Framed: 62.9 × 51.2 × 10.5 cm (24 3/4 × 20 1/8 × 4 1/8 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Romanticism

*Education of Cupid* is a luminous mythological cabinet piece that showcases Narcisse Diaz de la Peña at his most intimate — figures nestled in a dappled woodland setting, bathed in the warm, flickering light he made his signature. Diaz was a leading voice of the Barbizon School, though he occupied a singular position within it. Where his contemporaries Millet and Rousseau fixed their gaze on peasant labour and raw landscape, Diaz returned again and again to Venus, nymphs, and forest sprites — mythological subjects rendered with the School's characteristic directness and feel for natural light. His brushwork is richly textured, built up in confident impasto strokes that give his panels an almost jewel-like quality, and his colour sense — warm ambers, deep forest greens, creamy flesh tones — sits somewhere between Rubens and Corot. Born in Bordeaux to Spanish parents and largely self-taught, Diaz lost a leg in childhood following a snake bite, a hardship that, by most accounts, deepened rather than diminished his creative drive. Held in the Art Institute of Chicago, the original panel rewards close attention to surface and light. A hand-painted oil reproduction on panel honours that same quality, recreating the layered depth and tonal richness that no print can faithfully convey.