A light….seems to shine from the interior of the marble, and beam forth from the features.

This was Nathaniel Hawthorne’s assessment of Hiram Powers’s bust of Psyche, which he saw when he and his family visited Power’s studio in the summer of 1858.  Hawthorne reluctantly agreed with Powers’s own conviction that the artist’s busts of Psyche and Perserpone more nearly approached the ideal of beauty than did classical statuary like the Venus of Medici.

While Hiram Powers continued to create portrait busts, he became known as a sculptor of ideal figures.  The bust of Psyche was the third of these.  Commissioned by Bostonian Ignatius Sargent in 1848, it was completed the following year.  During the next fifteen years, the sculptor made nine copies in marble and three in plaster.  This example is apparently the original marble, purchased by a relative of the Codman family from the sale of Sargent’s art works in 1868.  The bust came to SPNEA through the Codman family and ornaments the drawing room of SPNEA’s Codman House in Lincoln, Massachusetts.

Psyche, symbolized by the butterfly (seen on the hair of Powers’s sculpture), personified the human soul.  In classical myth, Cupid fell in love with Psyche’s beauty while Aphrodite jealously tormented her; eventually Cupid’s love prevailed, and Psyche was immortalized.  Powers’s image of Psyche is a classical evocation of female beauty, and as such had great appeal in the nineteenth century. 

Carlisle, Nancy.  Cherished Possessions, A New England Legacy.  Boston: Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, 2003.