The Storm

Pierre Auguste Cot was a French painter of the Academic Classicism school. He created several works of lasting popularity, including Le Printemps, featuring two young lovers sitting upon a swing, and The Storm which we present today. Both these paintings are on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City; The Storm belongs to the museum while Le Printemps is owned privately. Cot also was renowned for his portraits, which made up most of his work. The more enduring figurative work, such as The Storm, is comparatively rare. When Cot exhibited this painting at the Salon of 1880, critics speculated about the source of the subject. Some proposed the French novel Paul and Virginie by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, in which the teenage protagonists run for shelter in a rainstorm, using the heroine’s overskirt as an impromptu umbrella; others suggested the romance Daphnis and Chloe by the ancient Greek writer Longus. New York collector and Metropolitan Museum benefactor Catharine Lorillard Wolfe commissioned the work under the guidance of her cousin John Wolfe, one of Cot's principal patrons. Like the artist’s earlier Springtime, it was immensely popular and extensively reproduced and is why we present this painting today - it hung in a bedroom of one of our users, Caroline, when she was a child :)