In 1880 a painting hung in the Paris Salon that visitors could not stop discussing, and not just because of its beauty. Two young people run barefoot down a forest path, caught in a sudden storm, a yellow cloth billowing over their heads. Everyone asked the same question: who are they? Pierre-Auguste Cot never said.
Critics at the time guessed at literary sources. Some saw the young lovers from Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's novel Paul and Virginie, a tale of two children growing up on a tropical island. Others thought of the ancient Greek romance of Daphnis and Chloe. The idea that Cot might have had no specific story in mind at all was less popular, but it is quite possible. The painting works because its story stays open.
Cot was a fashionable academic painter, a pupil of Alexandre Cabanel and William-Adolphe Bouguereau, two of the most successful artists in France. He knew that a pretty, emotional picture of young love would find an audience, and The Storm was widely reproduced in prints and photographs.
It came to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1887, through the bequest of the collector Catharine Lorillard Wolfe.
Look at what he paints well: the fluttering cloth, the transparent white dress, the wet-looking light on the leaves. The storm itself is barely seen. It is felt in movement, in the way the girl's hair and dress fly out behind her and the boy shields her with the cloth. Cot died in 1883 at only 45, three years after his greatest success.
Cot's The Storm appears on our: