Cortes, Edouard

Born into an artistic family during what has come to be called the “Belle Epoque”—those final decades of the 19th century when Paris was the cultural capital of the world—Cortes’s nostalgia for the period permeates his paintings. Untouched by the cataclysms of the 20th century, Cortes’s paintings have the quality of dripped candle wax, the accidental beauty of a passing past as crowds of people stroll along the softy lit boulevards.