Psyche 

Guillaume Seignac painted ‘Psyche’ sometime between 1890 and 1924. It depicts a nude winged woman in a classical style, alluding to the Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche. Seignac worked during the French Third Republic, a period when academic art was challenged by avant-garde movements. His art represents the conservative tastes of the French Salon system, where artists needed to impress juries to be successful. The mythological subject matter and soft, idealized nude reflect the values of academic painting which focused on beauty, morality, and historical themes. The historical associations and coy eroticism catered to the conservative upper classes. Understanding this painting fully requires attention to the institutional structures that supported it. Archival research into the French Salon system, art criticism of the period, and the social history of the French Third Republic can reveal more about the painting's cultural significance. Art history teaches us that art is always entangled with the social and institutional contexts in which it's made.