Further Images
| Medium | Oil on panel |
| Signed | Signed lower right and stamped with two further cachets verso |
| Size | 13.00" × 16.00" (33.0cm × 40.6cm) |
| Framed Size | 19.00" × 22.00" (48.3cm × 55.9cm) |
| Dated | c. 1925 |
| Condition | Very good condition |
| Provenance | This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from the Comité Édouard Cortés (EC-CEC-2025/55) This work was exhibited at the Exposition de la Société des Amis des Arts de L'Yonne in 1926 (original labels verso) |
| About this Painting | Edouard Léon Cortès (1882–1969) is best known as the poet of the Parisian boulevard — the rain-slicked cobblestones, the gas lamps reflected in wet stone, the carriages and umbrellas of the Belle Époque street. But this panel shows another side of him entirely, and in some ways a more revealing one. La Charette par Temps d'Orage — the cart in stormy weather — takes him out of the city and into the rural Normandy landscape he returned to throughout his life, particularly after moving back to Lagny-sur-Marne in the mid-1920s. The storm subject demanded exactly the kind of atmospheric observation that defined his best work: the particular quality of light under a bruised sky, the way colour drains and shifts in the moments before or during rain, the drama of movement — the horse, the cart, the human figure pressing on through the weather — set against a landscape that carries the full weight of the coming storm. The palette here works in the register he understood better than almost anyone of his generation: the greys and greens of a disrupted countryside sky, relieved by the warmer tones of the earth and the figure, the whole held together by a tonal intelligence that gives the composition its mood and its truth. Born in Lagny to a family of painters — his father Antonio was court painter to the Spanish royal family — Cortès studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and made his debut at sixteen. He went on to paint Paris through every season and every weather for six decades, exhibiting at the Salon des Artistes Français and the Salon des Indépendants. He was known and collected in both France and the United States throughout his long career. He died in Lagny in 1969, aged eighty-seven, with a street in the town named in his honour. |
£16,950.00
GBP
