Constantin Guys

(b Flushing, the Netherlands, 1802; d Paris, 13 March 1892). French draughtsman. His father was chief administrator of the merchant navy in the northern Netherlands, but Guys lived for most of his life in France; from 1848 he also spent some time in England. He belonged to the first generation of illustrators to be employed by the earliest of the great illustrated journals. As a correspondent for the Illustrated London News (after 1838) and for Punch in 1842, he was able to travel widely, visiting Bulgaria, Spain, Italy and Egypt and sending back sketches to be engraved as magazine illustrations. He recorded the Memorial Service for Greek Independence in Athens and The Sultan at the Bairam Festival in Constantinople. In 1855 he was sent to cover the Crimean War and witnessed the battles of Inkerman and Balaclava.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

Guys, Constantin (1805-92). The name of Guys is now indissociably linked to that of Baudelaire, who described him as ‘le peintre de la vie moderne’ in his famous essay of that name written in 1859. In his watercolours, engravings, and drawings of café life, military scenes, and fashionable Parisian society of the Second Empire, Guys's summary handling and mastery of light seemed to the poet to exemplify his ideal of the modern artist's relationship to his subjects: the ability to depict the combination of the ephemeral and the eternal essential to modern forms of beauty and to see the world with a child-like freshness of vision.

[James Kearns]

La Loge de l'opéra by Constantin Guys.

Constantin Guys, Ernest-Adolphe-Hyacinthe-Constantin, (Vlissingen Dec 3, 1802 - Paris Dec. 13, 1892) was a Crimean War correspondent, water color painter and illustrator for British and French newspapers. Baudelaire called him the "painter of modern life," and wrote a long essay on Guys in which he extensively praised his works, under the pseudonym "Monsieur G". His subjects were Second French Empire life.

Sources

• Artcyclopedia article on Constantin Guys
• Merriam-Webster's Biographical Dictionary. Merriam-Webster Incorporated, 1995. in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2007. Document Number: K1681154772. Online. November 6, 2007

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