Portrait of a man, dated 1895

Oil on canvas

Signed and dated, lower right

Dimensions: 41x 33 cm, with frame: 62 x 54 cm 

For this painting, the artist leaves the landscape to paint a portrait of a man. If he changes his pictorial genre, he does not abandon his touch by which he made himself famous. Landscape of the free school of landscape of the XIX th century, it vibrates the color by juxtaposing hatched keys. Here, his style serves his subject. It represents a man with a lively expression.

His eyes, drawn in one line, are framed by his square jaw, elongated nose and open forehead. The painter adorns his subject with simple clothes: the idea is not to detail the fabric, but to dress it in shades of purple and plum. Once again, Frédéric Samuel Cordey asserts himself as a champion of color and design.

Frédéric Samuel Cordey evolves with the Impressionists, he presents four paintings with the group for the fourth Impressionist exhibition in 1877.

Student of Isodor Pils and Gustave Boulanger at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he is part of the group (Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley) which rebels against academic education to follow the path of Impressionism . 

The artist participated in the Salon d'Automne in 1903. He rarely exhibited and art critics were laudatory about him. A retrospective exhibition took place at the Choiseul gallery in Paris in 1913. His fortune allowed him to work according to his own aspirations without depending on criticism and the help of merchants.

Appreciated by Gustave Caillebotte and particularly linked to Auguste Renoir, it   is featured in several paintings by the artist, including the “Bal du moulin de la galette”.  Renoir also represented him in The Conversation, alongside the model, Marguerite Legrand, known as “Margot”, a painting that can be found in the National Museum in Stockholm. 

An attentive landscaper, he enjoys depicting the surrounding nature; If the Auxerre countryside is one of the painter's favorite places, he stays not far from Camille Pissarro in Neuville-sur-Oise as well as in Eragny-sur-Oise.