Description:
Frank Enders (American, 1860-1921) "Cupid & Psyche" oil on canvas after William-Adolphe Bouguereau (French, 1825-1905) depicting Cupid capturing his mortal love, Psyche, within a gilt wood carved frame. Signed: Frank Enders (l/l). The reverse reads: "Frank Enders, After W.A. Bouguereau, Paris, Cupid and Pyske". A frame label reads: "J.O. Krimbholz - Fine Arts - Milwaukee".
Canvas Height: 42 1/2 inches (108 cm)
Canvas Width: 22 1/4 inches (56.5 cm)
Frame Height: 48 1/4 inches (122.6 cm)
Frame Width: 28 1/4 inches (71.8 cm)
Ref.: A2418 - Lot 11275
In the 19th century, Cupid and Psyche was a source for "transformations," visual interludes involving tableaux vivants, transparencies and stage machinery that were presented between the scenes of a pantomime but extraneous to the plot. During the 1890s, when tableaux vivants or "living pictures" were in vogue as a part of vaudeville, the 1889 Psyché et l'Amour of Bouguereau was among the artworks staged. To create these tableaux, costumed performers "froze" in poses before a background copied meticulously from the original and enlarged within a giant picture frame. Nudity was feigned by flesh-colored bodystockings that negotiated standards of realism, good taste, and morality. Claims of educational and artistic value allowed female nudes—a popular attraction—to evade censorship. Psyché et l'Amour was reproduced by the scenic painter Edouard von Kilanyi, who made a tour of Europe and the United States beginning in 1892, and by George Gordon in an Australian production that began its run in December 1894. The illusion of flight was so difficult to sustain that this tableau was necessarily brief. The performer billed as "The Modern Milo" during this period specialized in recreating female sculptures, a Psyche in addition to her namesake Venus de Milo.
Frederick Ashton choreographed a ballet Cupid and Psyche with music by Lord Berners and decor by Sir Francis Rose, first performed on 27 April 1939 by the Sadler's Wells Ballet (now Royal Ballet). Frank Staff danced as Cupid, Julia Farron as Psyche, Michael Somes as Pan, and June Brae as Venus.
Playwright Emily C. A. Snyder's five-act iambic pentameter version of Cupid and Psyche ~ A New Play in Blank Verse, produced by Turn to Flesh Productions, which premiered at The Barrow Group Theatre in New York City on Valentine's 2014, explores the nature of Lust unbounded and then transformed. The play incorporates both Elizabethan iambic pentameter verse (for the gods), as well as Molière rhyming couplets (for the lovers), with sections of prose (for some mortals.) The play takes a feminist approach in diverging from the original myth, giving Psyche more agency.
Frank Enders (1860-1921) was an American painter and etcher. Enders was born in Milwaukee, the son of a saloon owner in the city's German quarter. He was trained by Henry Vianden, and worked for him as a sign-painter. According to Hannah Heidi Levy's Famous Wisconsin Artists and Architects Enders worked in the shop of Henry Baumgaertner. At age 19 Enders traveled to Munich, Germany where he studied from 1879 to 1884 at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts with Alois Gabl and Wilhelm von Lindenschmit, especially history painting, genre works and landscape painting. Back in Milwaukee, he founded a studio at 55 Oneida Street. Later he was director of the art gallery of exhibition building in Milwaukee. The death of Frank Enders was published in the Eau Claire Leader newspaper on July 1, 1921. The death notice is dated June 29 and stated that Ender "belonged to the original artists colony established in the '1890s'
Museums:
MOWA - Museum of Wisconsin Art
Literature:
Listed in Bénézit, Dictionnaire des peintres, sculpteurs, dessinateurs et graveurs, Gründ 1976, Volume 4, Page 158.
Levy, Hannah H. Famous Wisconsin Artists and Architects. Oregon, WI: Badger Books, 2004. Pages 74-75
Pioneer Milwaukee Artist, First of Colony, Is Dead". Eau Claire Leader : p. 10. Retrieved 2010-07-26.