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The Storm

MediumPainting

Dimensions92 1/4 x 61 3/4 in. (234.3 x 156.8 cm)

ClassificationsPaintings

Credit LinePierre-Auguste Cot

Object numberDT11964

DescriptionThe Painting: Seven years after painting Springtime, Cot produced what has been called this "spiritual pendant" (Rubin 1980), a canvas that is similarly over life-size. The Met’s great patron Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, the cousin of John Wolfe, then owner of Springtime, commissioned The Storm after having seen Springtime in her cousin’s Manhattan mansion, where he had given it pride of place.

Caught in the midst of a sudden autumn storm, a young couple rushes to find shelter, temporarily shielding themselves from the imminent onrush with a deep mustard-toned fabric with a dramatic reflective sheen quite possibly deriving from the light of the moon. The leaves on the plants by their feet are browning, which confirms the season for their flight. The makeshift fabric umbrella picks up the reddish tones of the girl’s hair. While Cot might have initially sought out the same models seven years after Springtime, he seems to have used different models in the end. However, as in the earlier scene, both figures are barefoot and both have curly locks. Dressed only in transparent drapery in each painting, the girl’s nubile body becomes the star of the show. The boy is in classical garb in both pictures, too; here, a kind of loincloth accessorized with a shepherd’s horn. Instead of swinging on a sunny spring day, the pair in The Storm rush under a makeshift umbrella from a thunderstorm with an ominously dark sky and a bolt of lightning at top right. In subject and style, both paintings owe their origins to Cot’s teachers Bouguereau and Cabanel, who embraced genre scenes and mythological subjects with tidbits of titillation.

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