Springtime by Pierre Auguste Cot

Springtime (Primavera) by Pierre Auguste Cot, oil on canvas 1873, is a French classical academic painting of two young people sitting in a swing in a sunny, spring forest landscape. Cot paints a sentimental image of flowering first love between a young man and woman which combines both modern realism and inspiration from classical antiquity, as in the girl’s gaze at her love and in the carefully modeled drapery. The smooth, academic realist technique captures effects of light and shadow that border on the photorealistic, tempered by the gentle curves of classical drawing. Springtime was commissioned as a type of companion piece to Cot’s other large painting of young lovers, The Storm, both of which became enormously famous in Europe and America.