Guys, Constantin

Constantin Guys, (born 1802 or 1805, Flushing, Neth.—died Dec. 13, 1892, Paris), cartoonist and comic illustrator who depicted the fashionable world of the French Second Empire (1852–70). A fighter for Greek independence in his youth, Guys reported the Crimean War (1853–56) for The Illustrated London News. Settling in Paris in the 1860s, he continued to work for the News as an illustrator, and, at the same time, he won fame for his penetrating sketches of the great but contrived elegance of Parisian life under Napoleon III. Crippled by a carriage accident in 1885, Guys ended his days in poverty and obscurity.

Guy’s ink and watercolour drawings were the subject of an appreciative essay entitled “Le Peintre de la vie moderne” (1863; “The Painter of Modern Life”), by the poet Baudelaire.