Édouard Léon Cortès

Édouard Léon Cortès (1882-1969) was one of the most beloved French painters of Parisian street scenes, an artist whose luminous depictions of the boulevards, cafés, and monuments of the French capital earned him the affectionate title "Le Poète Parisien de la Peinture." Born in Lagny-sur-Marne, just outside Paris, he was the son of Antonio Cortès, a Spanish court painter who had settled in France, and from his father he received his earliest and most important artistic training.

Cortès devoted virtually his entire career to painting the streets of Paris, producing thousands of views of the city's most famous squares and thoroughfares over the course of a working life that spanned more than six decades. The Place de la Madeleine, the Place de la Concorde, the Champs-Élysées, the Place de l'Opéra, and the great cathedrals and bridges of the Seine appear again and again in his work, each rendered under different conditions of light, weather, and time of day. He was equally at home painting the golden warmth of a spring morning, the blue-gray light of a snowy afternoon, the reflective sheen of a rainy boulevard, or the gaslit shimmer of a Parisian evening.

Working through the Belle Époque, the First World War, the interwar years, the Second World War, and into the postwar period, Cortès captured Paris across an extraordinary span of history while maintaining a consistent, immediately recognizable style. His pictures are characterized by their loose, atmospheric brushwork, their carefully judged palette, and their affectionate observation of the small figures who populate his scenes. Today his paintings are among the most widely collected French street pictures of the twentieth century, treasured for their nostalgic evocation of a Paris that has become part of the world's shared imagination.