Springtime by Cot: Youth, Renewal, and a Swing in Bloom (1873)
In a sunlit wood, a young couple sit together on a rope swing. The girl, in a white gown so fine it is almost transparent, has wrapped her arms around the boy's neck and leans her cheek against his. He holds the ropes and gazes at her from a few centimetres away. Butterflies drift through the light, irises grow at their feet, and the whole forest seems to hold its breath. Springtime, shown by Pierre-Auguste Cot at the Paris Salon of 1873, was the greatest success of his career, and it is now one of the most loved French paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The picture below is our vintage poster version of the painting; the original is shown further down.
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Artist: Pierre-Auguste Cot (1837–1883)
Date: 1873
Medium: Oil on canvas, 211.6 × 127.8 cm
Collection: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2012.575), gift of Steven and Alexandra Cohen, 2012
First shown: Paris Salon, 1873
What does the painting show?
The two figures fill the centre of a tall canvas, more than two metres high. The swing hangs from two thick ropes that run straight up out of the picture, framing the couple like a column. The boy, dark-haired and tanned, wears a short orange-red tunic and sits with one leg bent, his hands gripping the ropes. The girl is fair and pale, dressed in a long white gown of muslin that floats around her legs. She clings to him with both arms and looks out at the viewer with a dreamy, half-smiling expression.
Around them the forest glows with soft green light. Sunbeams fall through the leaves, small butterflies flutter near the couple, and in the foreground grow tall blades of grass and purple irises. The whole picture is about youth, warmth and the first stirrings of love, at the season when nature itself comes back to life.
The swing was a familiar motif in French painting, most famously in Fragonard's The Swing, a century earlier, where it is a playful erotic game. Cot gives the theme an innocent, Arcadian air, but contemporaries noticed the sensual charge too: one visitor to the house where it hung described the couple as "drunken with first love", an Arcadian idyll "peppered with French spice".
A painting that went everywhere
At the Salon of 1873 Springtime was widely admired, and it became Cot's greatest success. It was copied in engravings and reproduced on fans, porcelain and tapestries. Its first owner was the New York businessman John Wolfe, who hung it in a place of honour in his Manhattan house. Seven years later his cousin, the collector Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, commissioned a companion piece from Cot: The Storm, in which another young couple runs from a thunderstorm under a billowing cloth.
Cot was born in Bédarieux, in the south of France, in 1837, and learned his craft from Alexandre Cabanel and William Bouguereau. He shares their smooth, polished finish, seen in Cabanel's Birth of Venus and in Bouguereau's Nymphs and Satyr, painted in the same year as Springtime. He died in Paris in 1883, aged only forty-five.
Where can you see it?
After more than a century in private hands, Springtime was given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2012 by Steven and Alexandra Cohen. Since then it has hung in gallery 827, next to The Storm, so that visitors can see the two great love scenes of Cot's career side by side.
Hang Pierre-Auguste Cot’s Springtime as a vintage art poster from the Sapiens Verbum print shop.
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Sources
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Springtime" (2012.575) and "The Storm" (87.15.134), collection records.
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