Sleeping Cupid

With his head resting gently on his arms, an infant Cupid is captured in a moment of slumber upon a bed. On the right-hand side, the edge of a painted gilt frame and a swag of pinkish-orange curtain create the layered sense that the little Cupid is a painting within a painting. The Cupid’s wings are particularly noteworthy, comprised of loosely-applied patches of colour rather than clearly outlined feathers.

The strange composition and tightly-cropped format suggest that this painting is a fragment of a much larger work. Historically, fragmenting paintings was common practice among dealers of Old Master paintings, allowing them to extract what they saw to be the most important and interesting parts of a painting to sell.