Constantin Guys French artist Date of Birth: 03.12.1805 Country: France

Biography of Constantin Guys

Constantin Guys, a French artist, was born on December 3, 1805 in the town of Flushing in the Netherlands to a French family. In his youth, he participated in the war for Greek independence alongside Lord Byron. During the 1840s and 1850s, he collaborated as a war artist for "London Illustrated News." In the early 1860s, he settled in Paris and devoted the rest of his life to sketching everything he saw around him. Similar to his contemporary and friend, Honore Daumier, Guys worked from memory and very quickly. He created several thousand pen drawings, tinted with watercolor. Unlike Daumier, Guys observed the manners of all layers of Parisian society with equal impartiality. Among the subjects of his works were elegant audiences in theaters, on boulevards, in the Bois de Boulogne, as well as scenes in cabarets, bistros, and public houses. Women were his best subjects; in this, he rivaled Goya, whose engravings and drawings clearly influenced the master's creativity. Guys mastered the entire spectrum of interpreting the image of a woman - from effortless elegance, later favored by Eduard Manet, to the audacity in the spirit of Toulouse-Lautrec or early Georges Rouault. Among his contemporaries, Gavarni was the closest to him, although the latter rarely achieved the perfection, grace, or sharpness of Guys' drawings. In 1863, Guys' work was discovered by Charles Baudelaire; he published a series of articles in Le Figaro titled "A Poet of Modern Life," which marked the beginning of his career as an art critic. The artist's humility and commitment to anonymity were incredibly great: he never exhibited his works or signed them, and he insisted that Baudelaire only refer to him by the initials of his name. Guys passed away in Paris on March 13, 1892.

An unsurpassed collection, assembled by Baudelaire, consists of several hundred drawings by Guys and is now owned by the Carnavalet Museum in Paris.