Landscape with Psyche Outside the Palace of Cupid, or The Enchanted Castle, 1664,[1] is a painting, oil on canvas, by Claude Lorrain in the National Gallery, London.
[2] The picture perhaps shows Psyche's enforced arrival in Cupid's Kingdom, when the Zephyr wafts her to 'deep valley, where she was laid in a soft grassy bed of most sweet and fragrant flowers'.
Yet the melancholy of the picture suggests Psyche's grief after Cupid's abandonment when according to Apuleius she lamented and keened before throwing herself into the next running water where she drowned.
It is sometimes thought – it is disputed – to have inspired the lines – Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam/Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn, – in one of his most famous poems, "Ode to a Nightingale".
There are no such doubts about another poem, called A Reminiscence of Claude's Enchanted Castle,[3] the parts of which most closely describing the painting are: