Буря

Pierre Auguste Cot made this for an American, the New York heiress Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, and showed it first at the Paris Salon of 1880, where it was an instant crowd-pleaser. Two young lovers dash through a sudden rainstorm, holding the girl's thin overskirt above them as a makeshift shelter while the wind presses her dress against her. Critics at the time could not agree where the story came from, some naming the old French novel Paul and Virginie, others the ancient Greek romance of Daphnis and Chloe. Cot left it open, and it hardly mattered to a public that bought the image endlessly as prints. Wolfe left her whole collection to the Metropolitan Museum in 1887, and The Storm came to New York with it.