Constantin Guys
The Hansom Team
1856-1869?
Physical Qualities
Pen and black ink and watercolor over graphite on board, Sheet: 275 x 360 mm. (10 13/16 x 14 3/16 in.)
Credit Line
Bequest of Saidie A. May
Object Number
2001.279
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.
The Baltimore Museum of Art by bequest, 1951; Saidie A. May (1879-1951), New York, 1926, by purchase from the John Quinn Estate; John Quinn (1870-1924), New York, 1917, by purchase from the Modern Gallery.
The Art Center, New York, NY, "Memorial Exhibition of Representative Works Selected from the John Quinn Collection," January 7-30, 1926, no. 51, p. 10.
The Baltimore Museum of Art, "Selections from the Saidie A. May Collection," July 9-September 24, 1950.
The Baltimore Museum of Art, "From Ingres to Gauguin, Nineteenth-Century French Paintings in Maryland," Nov.-Dec. 1951, no. 68.
The Baltimore Museum of Art, "Selections from the Saidie A. May Collection," July 9-September 24, 1950.
The Baltimore Museum of Art, "From Ingres to Gauguin, Nineteenth-Century French Paintings in Maryland," Nov.-Dec. 1951, no. 68.
Forbes Watson, "The John Quinn Collection of Paintings, Water Colors, Drawings & Sculpture," New York: Pidgeon Hill Press, 1926, p. 10, ill. p. 63.
'Saidie A. May Collection of Modern Paintings and Sculpture', "BMA News," The Baltimore Museum of Art, March 1950, p. 15, no. 50.
Fisher, Jay McKean, et al. The Essence of Line: French drawings from Ingres to Degas. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005, p. 256-57, ill.
Inscribed: VERSO: inscription erased; numbers.
