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.
Pierre Auguste Cot (1837 - 1883) was a classical academic French painter who attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and studied under Alexandre Cabanel and William-Adolphe Bouguereau. Cot exhibited very successfully in the French Salon and became enormously popular, winning many prizes including the French Legion of Honor. Cot excelled in the 19th century academic manner, creating smoothly modeled, carefully executed classical figurative compositions drawn from life and sources from classical antiquity. Cot died prematurely at age 46, memorialized by a monument in the city of his birth. After a century of neglect, interest has rekindled in the painters of the 19th century academic tradition.
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