To the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire, Constantin Guys was the prototypical painter of modern life. “Frequently whimsical, violent, extravagant, but always poetical, he knew how to concentrate in his drawings the bitter or heady flavor of the wine of Life,” he wrote of his friend. Rendered from life, Guy’s compositions evoke the follies and excesses of Parisian society during the second empire. Here, he captures an elegant carriage on a spree in the park, its passengers barely visible under their frilly bonnets and parasols.