Jean Cordet is identified as a French streetscape painter, usually stated to have been born in Lyons in 1910, though no birth record there has been found. He is (again reportedly) said to have trained in Paris under a ‘Professor Maurice’, travelled widely in France and elsewhere and finally settled in Vienna. Most of his work is just signed ‘Cordet’ and occasionally ‘Marcel Cordet’. Nothing else is known other than that his colourful and loosely painted works appear fairly often on the market. He does not appear in Benezit or any other similar listing and no date or place of death are known. It is possible – based on close style comparisons – that Cordet did not exist but was in fact a pseudonym of Robert Heyer-Hayes who also signed his work pseudonymously as ‘Layé’.
Both Cordet and Heyer-Hayes appear with a claim of being ‘well-known’ in an advertisement (Coventry Evening Telegraph, 19th September) for an exhibition of ‘Artists of Today’ at Anslow’s furnishing store in Coventry in 1963. Of the six others listed, two – Franz Wallis and Joseph Kugler – were also Austrian and all the paintings shown were priced at between 6 and 30 guineas.
Under whichever name Cordet/ Heyer-Hayes paintings appear all are in colourful and freely drawn post-Impressionist style, some being practically indistinguishable and others with some variation but not so much as definitely by another hand. While street scenes are their principal subject they may have also been first sold there, on artist stalls or on railings.
A fairly obvious conclusion from the 1963 Coventry exhibition is that the work being sold there was primarily decorative ‘picture-factory’ output, making claims to being by well-known artists for which authoritative evidence is likely to be as elusive as it is for Cordet/Heyer-Hayes, whether the same man or not.
Summarised from Art UK's Art Detective discussion 'Can we find out more about the French artist Jean Cordet and if he had a connection to the Slade?'
Text source: Art Detective
