The subject's pose, with arms lifted to reveal her nude body, derives from the Venus Callipyge, a celebrated Greco-Roman statue that Leighton would have seen and admired at the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples.

The story originated in the Roman writer Lucius Apuleius's Metamorphoses, commonly known as The Golden Ass.

They were sitting directly opposite one another, and, picking up a long, narrow-bladed dessert knife, Lord Leighton turned to his comrade in art and said: "My dear Tadema, what sort of subject do you expect me to paint on this?

When, however, he determined to enlarge the idea for a painting on canvas he cut off much of the water and the reflections from it and added the colonnade of marble columns in order to widen the space.

310 "Psyche," or, better, "Soma," we can admire her pretty, graceful lines, and the wonderful pure colour of the curtain and the sky, of the gold and of the copper, and the unfaltering hand that has drawn that body so simply and so tenderly.