Works on Paper

Constantin Ernest Adolphe Hyacinthe Guys
(1802 Flushing, The Netherlands - 1892 Paris)

“Coach with Driver and Two Horses”

Gouache and black ink on paper
Ss 10 x 7 ¼ inches (25.4 x 18.4 cm)

Private Collection, New York

* “Monsieur G. has deliberately filled a function which other artists disdain, and which a man of the world above all others could carry out. He has gone everywhere in quest of the ephemeral, the fleeting forms of beauty in the life of our day, the characteristic traits of which, with the reader's permission, we have called 'modernity.'

--Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life , c.1860

Baudelaire's call for an art of the present, an art of modern urban life, inspired painters like Édouard Manet. But for Baudelaire, the quintessential artist of contemporary Paris was Constantin Guys whom he obliquely referred to as "Monsieur G." Guys' watercolors and drawings of fashionable Parisians on display revealed for Baudelaire both the transitory and timeless aspects of modern life. “

*From the Getty Research website.

Guys worked for a time in London and traveled far and wide in Europe. He was greatly admired also by Manet and Delacroix and the photographer Nadar.