BIOGRAPHY - Edouard Léon Cortès (1882 - 1969)

Edouard Cortès was born into a family of painters. His grandfather, Andrés Cortès (1800-1861) was an “academician of the Holy Isabel of Sevilla (sic), dignified with several crosses of distinction, founding member of the Diputacion archaeological of Sevilla.”[i] His paintings were shown at the annual Exhibition of Arts in Seville, where he won a silver medal in 1858. Andrés’s son Antonio (1827-1908) likewise became a painter, initially at the royal court and then in France. At the age of thirty-two, Antonio set his sights on Paris, where he began to exhibit his work at the Salon in 1859. He returned briefly to Seville when his father died in 1861, but he returned to Paris by 1863. He lived in the Batignolles quarter at 4 rue des Dames, keeping a separate studio a few blocks away at 90 rue de Clichy. In the 1860s, the neighborhood was home to a lively artistic community, including the so-called Batignolles group that gathered around Édouard Manet.

Antonio’s stay in Paris lasted only until 1866, when he married Angélique Berger, a young widow, on September 13th. The couple moved about fifteen miles east of Paris to Lagny-Thorigny, a town on the Marne river. They had a son, André George Charles Fernand Cortès y Aguilar, born on December 20, 1866. The next five years seem to have been both prosperous and pleasant. Antonio continued to exhibit at the annual Salon and established a reputation as a painter of rural landscapes. Angélique died unexpectedly on January 5, 1871, at age thirty-three, leaving behind her five-year-old son. Antonio remarried less than two years later, on August 22, 1872. His new bride was the twenty-two-year-old Léontine-Augustine Frappart, a dressmaker. The family continued to live in Lagny, where Léontine gave birth to a daughter, Jeanne-Marie, in 1874. Antonio’s career was thriving, and his son André began studying painting with his father in approximately 1880.

It was not until 1882 that the youngest of the Cortès children made his appearance; Edouard-Léon Henri was born at home at 3 rue des Etuves in Lagny on August 6th. Edouard, called Henri by his family, started school in 1888, earning his Elementary School certificate in 1895 at age thirteen. At that time, he too began to study painting in his father’s studio. By this time, both his brother and sister had gotten married and begun their own families. Like his father before him, André had made his Salon debut in 1886, and was pursuing a successful career as a landscape painter.[ii] Sadly, André’s future was cut short in 1898, when he died at age thirty-one; his four-year-old daughter Lucie died four months later in September.

Edouard Cortès followed his brother’s career path the next spring, making his Salon debut at age sixteen in April 1899 with the painting Le Labour, showing a farmer plowing his field. The work clearly owes a debt to both Realist and Naturalist painters, as well as the work of his brother and father. Its acceptance by the Salon jury signaled that the youngest Cortès showed great promise. The critics agreed. Le Figaro proclaimed, “His style and his color have greatly impressed the jury. Young Cortès did, of course, attend a good school: we all know what a talented artist his father is.”[iii] The newspaper Le Matin commented that Cortès was “a little chap, only so high, who by rights should still be wearing out the seat of his trousers on his school bench, but who, nonetheless, with his light touch, has already entered canvasses for the Salon: a colleague of Jean-Paul Laurens, and rival to Henner”.[iv] The Salon coverage in Germany and England concurred, with the British illustrated weekly journal The Sketch publishing a short piece entitled “A Clever Boy Artist”. The author offered readers a thoughtful assessment of the painting: “This is no 'studio picture', but a work of a disciple of the plein-air school to whom Nature is 'un livre toujours ouvert devant mes yeux et où il y a toujours a approfoundir ses mystères—' a book every open before my eyes and in which the mysteries of Nature are ever to be fathomed.”[v]

Shortly after the close of the 1899 Salon exhibition, Marie-Edmond Höner (1830-1900), a painter and lithographer based in Lagny, decided to create a local artistic society. To that end, he founded the Union Artistique et Littéraraire du Canton de Lagny to establish a regional exhibition program. This organization would prove to be an important forum for Cortès throughout his life, both as a gathering place for visual artists and as an exhibition venue in Lagny. Le Labour was included in the first exhibition, which opened on August 27th in the courtyard of a local school. The following year, Cortès submitted five paintings to the second exhibition.

Over the next few years, the young painter continued to live and study with his father in Lagny, sending several paintings each year for consideration by the Salon jury. His work was included in the annual exhibition in 1901, 1902, and 1903. Because of his father’s advanced age and Edouard’s status as the only remaining son of the family, he was exempted from French military service. Many soldiers in the French military were often sent abroad to France's colonial holdings, like Algeria or Indochina. Cortès, however, used this time to explore the French countryside instead. After participating in the Salon in 1905, the painter embarked on an extended stay with his sister Jeanne and her family in Le Tréport, Normandy, where he encountered a landscape that would become a recurring theme in his painting.

In 1906, Cortès exhibited the painting Le Boulevard de la Madeleine, soir d’automne, an early example of what would become his signature image of a Paris streetscape. He chose the same type of image for the next Salon as well, submitting Soir de neige près du square Montholon. By 1907, he was confident enough of his painting to organize an auction of his own works at the Hôtel Drouot in April 1907, where he earned 250 francs.

Having achieved a certain success as a painter, Cortès began to broaden his scope, exhibiting his work throughout France at regional salons beginning with the Toulouse International Industrial Salon in 1908. There, he received a third-class medal for La Port de Pantin, soir de neige. Additionally, he joined a professional organization that year, the Association Amicale des Paysagistes Français (the Association of French Landscape Painters), under the leadership of Henri Harpignies. The year brought sorrow as well, with the death of his father Antonio at the age of eighty-one.

To support his mother, Cortès focused ever more intensely on establishing a prosperous career. He continued to display his work at the Paris Salon and to explore other opportunities for exhibitions. Increasingly, his work drew critical attention from the press. In 1910, one of his Salon paintings received coverage in seventeen articles in several publications. He was also able to purchase property at 22 rue Macheret in Lagny as a home for himself and his mother.

In the following years, Cortès established a pattern of exhibitions throughout the country. To use 1911 as an example, he exhibited at the annual Paris Salon in April, followed by a show at the Union Artistique des Ardennes in June; the Société des Amis des Arts de l’Avallonnais in August; the Société Artistique de Charenton in September; and the Société des Artists Girondins at the Autumn Salon in Bordeaux in October. Although the locations of the regional exhibitions varied from year to year, this pattern set the rhythm for Cortès’ career for many years.

In 1913, Cortès again spent part of the summer in Loquirec, Brittany, having the good fortune to “develop an affectionate relationship with Fernande Joyeuse.”[vi] On December 10, 1914, they were married in Paris. Their honeymoon was short-lived, however, since Cortés enlisted in the army as the First World War got going. His drawing skills meant he often moved from one regiment to another to visually record military information. He also created postcards of military life that he mailed home to Fernande. These images of the countryside and the soldiers, sometimes in the trenches, have the immediacy of a reporter’s observations at the front. Back in Paris, Fernande opened a millinery shop at 35 rue Piat in the 20th arrondissement, working with her sister Lucienne to support the family. On March 24, 1916, she gave birth to a daughter, Simonne-Jacqueline Cortés.

Cortés was wounded on November 22, 1917, and was appointed a general staff officer for the remainder of his time in the service. Nonetheless, he was stationed in the Champagne-Ardennes region from August to November 1918, just after the Second Battle of the Marne (July 15-19, 1918). He was part of the “liberation army” routing out the last of the Germans and reconstructing the devastated area. In the midst of this unimaginable destruction, Fernande died on October 21st, entrusting two-year-old Jacqueline to the care of her sister. Cortés was not demobilized until 1919, when he returned home to 15 rue Mélingue in the Buttes Chaumont neighborhood of Paris.

The next year or two must have been a time of significant adjustment. It certainly was a time of change for Cortès in both his personal life and his career. In the spring of 1919, he participated in a special exhibition sponsored jointly by the Sociéte des Artists Français and the Sociéte National des Beaux-Arts to aid in war repairs. Cortès exhibited several paintings and pastels based on his military sketches. The following year, he presented only one gouache at the annual Salon of the Société des Artistes Français, and it was the last time that he exhibited there.

Cortès married his sister-in-law, Lucienne Joyeuse, on September 29, 1919, and moved back to his home in Lagny. A series of gouaches from this period show springtime landscapes with details of flowering shrubs, wisteria vines, and a modest watering can beside a white rose. After the images of destruction and ruin from 1919, the artist seems to have found a sense of comfort in his own home. Likewise, the images from the summer of 1920 in Brittany and Normandy, mostly gouaches, focus not on the drama of the Breton landscape but on the quiet of an ancient shrine or sunlight on the hills near the sea.

Cortès also found a new market for his art in the inter-war world. In 1921, he sold eighty-two paintings to art dealers, discovering his work was widely appreciated abroad. He formulated a new promotion strategy to exhibit at two or three of the big Paris exhibitions early in the year, participate in several regional salons, and develop an American clientele through selected dealers. The year 1922 illustrates this clearly: he participated in the Winter Salon at the Grand Palais, the Société des Artists Indépendants Salon, and the École Français Salon in Paris. He turned to several regional salons in Aube, Dijon, and Bordeaux. During the summer, he and Lucienne traveled to Brittany and Normandy, where Cortès could paint while visiting his sister and her family. The year ended on a sad note with the death of the artist’s mother, Léontine, on December 11th at age seventy.

Cortès followed this pattern consistently for the next few years. Of note, however, was the reinvigoration of the Union Artistique et Littéraraire du Canton de Lagny in 1926. He and the surviving members decided to re-establish the organization with patronage from the town council of Lagny and begin to present their own annual exhibition. They received official approval on December 10, 1926, holding their first exhibition in 1927. From this point on, the Union Artistique et Littéraraire would remain a touchstone for Cortès; a link with his hometown community of artists and a reminder of his own roots.

The late 1920s brought an international client, the T. Eaton Company Limited of Toronto. Founded in 1869, Eatons was Canada’s largest department store with a mail-order catalogue business that rivaled that of Montgomery Ward. In 1928, Eaton commissioned thirty paintings by Cortès to be shown in Toronto, Winnipeg, and Montreal between November and December. Eaton's remained a steady client until the Great Depression of the 1930s. More importantly, it introduced Cortès to the North American commercial art market.

The 1930s proved to be challenging for Cortès. With the death of his brother-in-law, Emile Froment, in late 1928, his sister Jeanne and two of her daughters relied more often on the painter for assistance at a time when sales were less consistent. Despite the occasional hardship, Cortès’s public reputation grew partly because of his persistence in exhibiting in Paris each year regardless of the economy. As the decade passed, he and Lucienne spent every summer with Jeanne and her daughters in Normandy, usually at Cormelles-le-Royal (Calvados), not too far from Caen. Every autumn, there was an exhibition at the Union Artistique in Lagny. Perhaps the happiest event of this decade was the wedding of Cortès’s daughter Jacqueline to Georges Chevalier on February 4, 1936.

When war broke out again on September 3, 1939, Edouard and Lucienne stayed in Cormelles-le-Royal with his sister. A neighboring farm family, the Oblins, supplied them with food from their gardens throughout the conflict. They remained there until the end of the war, managing to sustain themselves until 1944 when the Allies mistakenly bombed Cormelles and destroyed Cortès’s studio. In the final months of the war, the Oblins' farm was also bombed, leaving both families without a reliable food source. The Oblins moved into the Froment-Cortès home, managing their meager joint resources until the Germans surrendered on May 7, 1945.

Throughout the war years, Cortès persevered in sending his paintings to the annual Paris exhibitions and a museum show in Caen. During these years, he also contacted an art dealer named Herbert Arnot and began a long-term business relationship. Arnot came from a Viennese family of art dealers active since 1863, with Herbert opening a gallery in New York in the early 1940s. Cortès’s paintings were first displayed there in 1946.[vii] For the next few decades, Arnot was an enthusiastic supporter of Cortès’s work and an important promoter of his paintings to both commercial and private clients throughout the United States. Gradually, Cortès replenished his bank account and ultimately built a flourishing post-war career fueled by the popularity of his Parisian streetscapes among North American collectors.

In 1954, Cortès’s sister Jeanne died in Indre et Loire. He and Lucienne moved back to Lagny that same year. The Union Artistique celebrated its twenty-fifth annual exhibition in 1955. That same year, the painter began working regularly with R. Stanley Johnson, an art dealer located at 645 North Michigan Avenue in Chicago. Cortès’s work had been routinely covered by Chicago media at least as far back as 1923 when the Chicago Tribune mentioned his six paintings in a review of the Salon d’hiver in Paris.[viii] A few years later, Findlay Galleries in Chicago included Cortès's paintings in an exhibition titled French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. They later gave Cortès a solo show at their Palm Beach gallery.

Despite his advancing years, Cortès continued painting throughout the 1960s, sending two paintings to the Union Artistique's twenty-seventh annual exhibition in 1966. However, Lucienne’s health was declining, and Jacqueline moved her family to be closer to her parents. On November 13, 1967, Lucienne died at age seventy-seven. Cortès continued to paint until November 26, 1969 when he died at age eighty-eight.


Janet Whitmore, Ph.D.


Museum Collections:
Bair Museum, Martinsdale, Montana
Martin Museum of Art, Baylor University, Waco, Texas
Provincial Museum of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Pushkin Museum, Moscow

[i] Nicole Verdier, Edouard Cortès, Catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre peint, Vol. 1 (Paris: Contexte, 2002) 19. Originally published in Manuel Ossorio y Bernand, Galeria biografica de artistas expanoles del siglo XIX, 1883-84.

[ii] André Cortès exhibited at the Salon in 1886, 1888, 1890, 1891 and 1894. See Verdier, Edouard Cortès, Vol. 1, 35-43.

[iii] Le Figaro, 26 Avril 1899. Reprinted in Verdier, Vol. 1, 47.

[iv] Le Matin, 1 May 1899. Reprinted in Verdier, Vol. 1, 47.

[v] “A Clever Boy Artist” The Sketch, no. 334, Vol. XXVI: 369.

[vi] Verdier, Vol. 1, 71.

[vii] Verdier, Edouard Cortès, Vol. 2, 15.

[viii] Verdier, Edouard Cortès, Vol. 1, 81.