Lot 2306 Dα

Verso "Seated Woman", Bleist.


This ink drawing was reproduced in Charles Baudelaire's "Le Peintre de la vie moderne", Editions René Keiffer, Paris 1923, on page 74.
The self-taught Franco-Dutch Constantin Guys first began as a war draughtsman and correspondent for English and French newspapers. He reported from the Crimean War and the Orient. In 1860 he finally settled in Paris, where his real artistic career began. Friends with the poet Baudelaire, the painter and illustrator Honoré Daumier and the photographer Felix Nadar, he practised keen observation and soon became a witty and humorous chronicler of Parisian society with its pleasures and vices.