Purchased in 2008 with the help of the Amis des musées (Friends of the Museums), the painting is without a doubt one of the major acquisitions of the last decade. It is part of a series of unusually large-scale dramatic compositions with which Abraham Bloemaert and his fellow artists Cornelis van Harlem and Joachim Wtewael astonished the public around 1590, introducing Mannerism into Dutch art with a stroke of genius.

In the narrower sense, the subject is not part of classical mythology, but refers to a legend from late Antiquity told by Apuleius in the books IV and VI of his Metamorphoses: wonderfully beautiful, Psyche attracted the jealousy of the goddess Venus, who sent her messenger Cupid in order to make Psyche fall in love with a miserable mortal. Instead, Cupid himself falls in love with Psyche and abducts her. He visited her only during the night, forbidding her to look at him. One night, however, Psyche surprises him in his sleep by shining a lamp on him. A drop of boiling oil fell on the god and woke him. Angry, he pushes his mistress away and she is condemned to wonder the earth without respite in search of her beloved.

Bloemaert certainly also chose the theme for the challenge of painting a large female nude. His figure of Psyche is based on an invention by Leonardo and completed by Pontormo that is kept today in the Uffizi in Florence. His classical source, the Sleeping Ariadne, a 2nd century copy of a Hellenistic original that is now kept at the Vatican Museums, was placed at the centre of a fountain in the Belvedere garden in 1512 by Pope Jules II. Around 1540, the sculpture was cast in bronze for Francis I using moulds made by Primaticcio. Bloemaert may well have seen it during his three-year stay in France (1583-1586), which took him to Paris and Fontainebleau.