Academically trained French painter Pierre-Auguste Cot, who was a student of Bouguereau, among others, is particularly known for two similarly striking paintings, The Storm (above, top three images) and Springtime (bottom four images).

Both are beautifully rendered, with a feeling of lush naturalism, playfully romantic and more than a little suggestive. Check out the smoldering look the young woman is giving her companion on the swing in Springtime.

Of course, dressing up modern passion in academically approved antique dress, like the depiction of nymphs and satyrs, made an image a “history painting”, and events from mythology or history could excuse a great deal of romance-fueled suggestion in late 19th Century France.

Both works have been immensely popular from their creation to this day, and have been the subject of countless reproductions over that time.

Both paintings are in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and a reader (thanks, radium56!) has informed me that both are now prominently on display before the entrance to the 19th and 20th century European paintings gallery, where they make a dramatic visual impression.

For those of us who can’t run over to the Met tomorrow to check them out, the museum’s excellent website has high-resolution images of both (click on “Fullscreen” under the image on the main page, then the “Download” arrow at bottom right).

As far as I can tell the museum is not making a point of this as a mini-exhibition or feature on the schedule, it just seems to be a curator’s idea of a fine way to celebrate spring.

Indeed.

Boston painter Robert Douglas Hunter studied with R.H. Ives Gammell, carrying forward his defense of classical academic tradition in the face of modernist orthodoxy.

Hunter’s refined, elegant still life paintings of simple objects wrapped in soft light and contemplative stillness, carry echoes of the 19th century French ateliers and even further back to Chardin and the Dutch still life masters.

I don’t know of a dedicated site for Hunter, but I can direct you to galleries that feature his work as well as the Guild of Boston Artists, of which he was president for several years.

Hunter taught at the Vesper School of Art and the Worchester Art Museum. He is the recipient of numerous awards and his work is in the collections of museums and other institutions in the northeastern US and nationwide.

Harry Clarke was a Irish illustrator and stained glass artist, active in the early 20th Century, in the latter part of the Golden Age of Illustration.

As an illustrator, he is known in particular for his work for Hans Christian Anderson’s Fairy Tales and Edgar Allen Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination.

You can see the influence of earlier Golden Age greats like Edmund Dulac, Kay Nielsen and Aubrey Beardsley, but Clarke wove his influences into a unique and fascinating style. You can also see Clarke’s influence carried forward, for example in the work of contemporary comics artist and illustrator P. Craig Russell.

There is a particularly good resource of Clarke’s work on 50 Watts with excellently prepared images of his work, including his black and white Poe illustrations and a selection of detail crops from them, along with the text decorations and color plates.

There is also a wider selection of Clarke’s work, though with smaller images, on Grandma’s Graphics

[Obliquely via io9, (skip the FastCo Design link, it’s poorly presented)]

[Note: some of the images (particularly the Poe color plates) should be considered NSFW and not suitable for children.]