![]() Later, during World War II, Cortès and his family spent time in Normandy to escape the horrors of the conflict. When he was able to return to his easel, Cortès desired solely to paint peaceful scenes of France’s capital city. The artist spent time sketching enemy positions on the front lines, and this may have deepened his anti-war resolve. Cortès went on to study at École des Beaux-Arts.Īs World War I gained steam, Cortès willingly joined the French military effort even though he was a pacifist. He found success among art critics as well as the public and earned renown in France. The son and pupil of Spanish painter Antonio Cortès, his influences included Barbizon painters Constant Troyon and Henri Harpignies.Įstablishing a name for himself early on in his long career, Cortès first exhibited a painting he called La Labour at the Société des Artistes Français when he was still in his late teens. Édouard Leon Cortès is widely known for his Impressionistic renderings of Parisian promenades and rustic French hamlets. His virtuosic interpretation of the aesthetics within the European metropolis provoked particular interest among art collectors in North America, as the ambience so synonymous with his miniature compositions contrasted the very modernist and cosmopolitan canons relevant to mid-20th century New York. This subtle and nuanced approach to the intricacies of Parisian life is hardly surprising the artist was now aware of his consolidated status as an observer and painter of Parisian life, famously effortless in capturing the essence of its social fabric. While Cortes is bold with his brushstroke, he chooses to use deep, amber yellows, contrasting his visible application with their atmospheric, autumnal softness. ![]() ![]() The composition’s interplay of earthy tones is diffused by luminous hues of warm light emitted throughout the pictorial space. Having observed the landscape’s seasonal changes, Cortez renders the image as a hazy sepia, optically merging its subjects with the overcast sky. Returning to the somber and nostalgic visions of Parisian life, Cortes's Porte Saint Denis is an authentic glimpse into the essence of the city, governed by changes of the inter-war period.Īs the culmination of his career played out throughout the 1930s, the artist revisited the scene numerous times. His idealisation of the period, on the other hand, does not bear a character of aristocratic splendour and prosperuity, Cortes is rather keen in depicting ordinary everyday life of the city and its crowd. It is a part of a famous European nostalgia for prosperity and peace of La Belle Époque, and Cortes prolongs this period up to the end of 1930s, a sort of a lost paradise. However, his views of Paris of the first quarter of the century bear as well a sentimental meaning, as the artist had admitted he had wished to stop history before the Second World War. To create a Romantic vision, a souvenir from that time, an image of the city that has been rapidly changing and growing. In his iconic views of Paris of the beginning of the XX century, Èdouard Cortès carries over the wistful, sensitive and observative manner of Barbizons, combining it with a soft touch of Impressionism Although set in urban landscapes, his paintings convey the same fine sensuality in the tratment of details such as the colour of the sky and leaves, shapes of trees, reflections on the ground and inviting electric lights. Looking at Cortes’s oeuvre, one may immediately grasp his awareness and adherence of the Barbizons. Participant of many of Paris artistic Salons, Cortès had been also awarded a prestigious Prix Antoine-Quinson. Èdouard Leon Cortès, the son of a court painter Antonio Cortès was born in Lagny, close to Paris at the end of the XIX century, when The City of Lights was the artistic capital of the world and when the newĪrt, symbolized by the Impressionism had already been spread.Ĭortès was primarily trained by his father, an adherent of a Barbizon school, whose painters took their inspiration in nature itself, enjoying the freedom of observation rather than following the Academic rules of the time. That gives me eight to ten hours a day to paint”. Front of my easel at around eight in the morning from twelve to two I eat lunch and rest, and I paint in the afternoon till dusk, because
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