The Storm is a painting by French artist Pierre Auguste Cot

Pierre Auguste Cot

Pierre Auguste Cot was a French painter of the Academic Classicism school.-Biography:He was born in Bédarieux, Hérault and initially studied at l'Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Toulouse before going to Paris. He studied under Leon Cogniet, Alexandre Cabanel and William-Adolphe Bouguereau...

, completed in 1880. Currently on display at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art

Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a renowned art museum in New York City. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, located on the eastern edge of Central Park along Manhattan's Museum Mile, is one of the...

, the painting was commissioned from the artist in 1880 by Catharine Lorillard Wolfe

Catharine Lorillard Wolfe

Catharine Lorillard Wolfe was an American philanthropist and art collector. Though she gave large amounts of money to institutions such as Grace Episcopal Church and Union College, her most significant gifts were two bequests to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City...

 under the guidance of her cousin John Wolfe, one of Cot's principal patrons.

Though long regarded as a symbol of late nineteenth century academicism

Academic art

Academic art is a style of painting and sculpture produced under the influence of European academies of art. Specifically, academic art is the art and artists influenced by the standards of the French Académie des Beaux-Arts, which practiced under the movements of Neoclassicism and Romanticism,...

, The Storm, even today, continues to attract a litany of caustic attacks.

Theme and elements

The painting is reminiscent of an earlier work, Spring, which was completed by Cot in 1870. This painting was subsequently acquired by John Wolfe after it was displayed with astounding success at the Salon of 1873. It is believed that the presence of Spring in Wolfe's collection was the impetus that drove his cousin, Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, to purchase The Storm in 1880. Both paintings are of roughly the same dimensions and are evidently related in subject in the sense that both portray a young, nubile couple. It is from this therefore, that the two paintings are thought to form a symbiotic pair, where the success of the earlier work led to the creation of the latter.

When it was first exhibited at the Salon in 1880, there was much speculation amongst Cot's comtemporaries as to the subject the painter meant to allude to - with some drawing reference to the story Paul et Virginie

Paul et Virginie

Paul et Virginie is a novel by Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, first published in 1787. The novel's title characters are very good friends since birth who fall in love...

, first published by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre

Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre

Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre was a French writer and botanist...

 in 1788, and others to the fourth century romance Daphnis and Chloe

Daphnis and Chloe

Daphnis and Chloe is the only known work of the 2nd century AD Greek novelist and romancer Longus.-Setting and style:It is set on the isle of Lesbos during the 2nd century AD, which is also assumed to be the author's home. Its style is rhetorical and pastoral; its shepherds and shepherdesses are...

 by the Hellenistic writer Longus

Longus

Longus, sometimes Longos , was the author of an ancient Greek novel or romance, Daphnis and Chloe. Very little is known of his life, and it is assumed that he lived on the isle of Lesbos during the 2nd century AD...

. Evidence for the first interpretation comes from the specific motif of the couple running from the rain and covered by a billowing drapery corresponding to a famous and often illutrated scene in Paul et Virginie: