Edouard Léon Cortès was a French painter known for his idealized, Impressionistic scenes of Parisian streets and rural French villages. Though Cortès was decades younger than the first generation of Impressionist painters like Claude Monet, his paintings are more aligned with the earlier generation than they are to his Post-Impressionist peers André Derain or Henri Matisse. Born on April 26, 1882 in Lagny-sur-Marne, his father was the artist Antonio Cortés Cordero, who served as a painter at the royal court of Spain. He went on to study at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1899, and in 1915, he was awarded the Silver Medal at the Société des Artistes Français, and then the Gold Medal at the Salon des Indépendants. Today, the majority of Cortès’ work is found in private collections in Europe and North America. He died on November 26, 1969 in Lagny-sur-Marne, France.