The Painter of Modern Times: Constantin Guys
Joanna Richardson portrays one of the greatest of nineteenth-century pictorial journalists, Constantin Guys; a remarkably perceptive artist, to whom Charles Baudelaire consecrated his most famous work in prose.
‘I want to tell the public to-day about a singular man, so powerfully original and so determined that he is self-sufficient, and does not even seek for approval.
None of his drawings is signed, if a signature means those few letters, easy to forge, which spell out a name: the signature which so many others put pretentiously at the bottom of their most insignificant sketches. But all his works are signed with his brilliant spirit...
M.C.G. is a great lover of the crowd and of incognito, and he takes originality to the point of modesty...’
With these words, in Le Peintre da la vie moderne, Baudelaire began his sensitive and superb appreciation of the artist whom he simply called M.G.: the artist whom we know as Constantin Guys.
This essay first appeared as a series of articles in Le Figaro; the first instalment was published on November 26th, 1863. It appeared again in L’Art romantique, the collection of essays which came out in 1869, after Baudelaire’s death.
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