Bringing art back to life

Naracoorte Regional Art Gallery unveils donated work

A French oil painting which is part of the Naracoorte Regional Art Gallery’s permanent collection has been cleaned and restored.

The picture, entitled Marche aux Fleurs or Flower Market by Edouard Cortes has been brought back to life through a grant from mining company Australian Rare Earths.

It was recently unveiled at the gallery by Jacqui Owen, the company’s manager of Community and Land.

Cortes was a post-impressionist artist working in and around Paris. The flower market in the scene was in the Place de la Madeleine on a wintry night, after rain.

The painting was donated to the art gallery prior it to moving from Smith Street to the current building in Ormerod Street in 1998. It is not known who the donor was or when the picture was painted and if anyone can help, the gallery would be pleased to find out these details.

A woman and a child feature in several of Cortes’s paintings including this picture and are thought to be Lucienne, his wife and his daughter, Jacquelin who was born in 1918. This date places the picture to the mid-1920s, given the age of the child.

Cortes, who was tutored by his artist father, Antonio, had a work exhibited when he was 16 and his first full exhibition as a 19-year-old, to wide acclaim.

He became known as The Parisian Poet of Painting because of his diverse Paris cityscapes in a variety of weather and at night.

However, he was a very modest man and preferred to remain anonymous as an individual, to allow his paintings to speak for themselves by standing on their own merit. He died in 1969 aged 87.

Naracoorte Regional Art Gallery chair Jeanette Vine said the sponsorship had enabled Artlab in Adelaide to carry out the restoration and the painting was now was at its best.

BRINGING ART BACK TO LIFE: Naracoorte Regional Art Gallery chair Jeanette Vine; Australian Rare Earths manager of community and land Jacqui Owen & Naracoorte Lucindale Mayor Patrick Ross