Pierre Auguste Cot

Two paintings made Pierre-Auguste Cot famous, and both now hang in the same museum in New York. The first, Springtime, shows a young couple wrapped together on a garden swing. When he exhibited it at the Paris Salon of 1873 it became a sensation, copied onto fans, porcelain and tapestries and reproduced in prints for decades. He followed it in 1880 with The Storm, a pair of lovers running under a shared length of cloth as the sky breaks, and it sold to a wealthy New York collector, Catharine Lorillard Wolfe.

Cot trained in the polished academic manner of the two most powerful teachers of the day, Alexandre Cabanel and William Bouguereau, and he stayed loyal to it while the Impressionists were pulling French painting elsewhere. Both of his celebrated canvases came to the Metropolitan Museum through his American patrons, the Wolfe family, and hang there still.