GUYS, THE ILLUSTRATOR

Practitioners of the noble art of illustration are, as we know, modest men, but no matter the degree of their modesty they are all distanced by the record in shyness still maintained by Constantin Guys.  This artist was once a living protest against Goethe’s assertion that only fools are modest, and the monument recently erected to his memory in Paris is provocation enough to bring him ferrying across the Styx to enter a disclaimer in the very teeth of his admirers.  So set in his anonymity was he that Charles Baudelaire, his critical discoverer, was forced to write a long essay about his work and only refer to the artist as C.G.  The poet relates that once when Thackeray spoke to Guys in a London newspaper office and congratulated him on his bold sketches in the Illustrated London News, the fiery little man resented the praise as an outrage.  Nor was this humility a pose.  His life long he was morbidly nervous, as was Meryon, as was Cezanne; but he was neither half mad, like the great etcher, nor a cenobite, as was the painter of Aix.  Few have lived in the thick of life as did Guys.  To employ the phrase of Turgenieff, life, like grass, grew over his head.  In the Crimean camps, on the Parisian boulevards, in London parks, Guys strolled, crayon in hand, a true reporter of things seen and an ardent lover of horses, soldiers, pretty women, and the mob.  Baudelaire called him the soldier-artist.  He resembled in his restless wanderings Poe’s man of the multitude, and at the end of a long life he still drew, as did Hokusai.

Who was he?  Where did he receive his artistic training?  Baudelaire did not tell, nor Theophile Gautier.  He went through the Crimean campaign; he lived in the East, in London and Paris.  Not so long ago the art critic Roger Marx, while stopping at Flushing, Holland, discovered his baptismal certificate, which reads thus:  “Ernestus Adolphus Hyacinthus Constantinus Guys, born at Flushing December 3, 1805, of Elizabeth Betin and Francois Lazare Guys, Commissary of the French Marine.”  The baptism occurred January 26, 1806, and revealed the fact that he had for godfather an uncle who held a diplomatic position.  Guys told his friends that his full family name was Guys de Sainte-Helene—­which may have been an amiable weakness of the same order as that of Barbey d’Aurevilly and of Villiers de l’Isle Adam, both of whom boasted noble parentage.  However, Guys was little given to talk of any sort.  He was loquacious only with his pencil, and from being absolutely forgotten after the downfall of the Second Empire to-day every scrap of his work is being collected, even fought for, by French and German collectors.  Yet when the Nadar collection was dispersed, June, 1909, in Paris, his aquarelles went for a few francs.  Felix Feneon and several others now own complete sets.  In New York there are a few specimens in the possession of private collectors, though the Lenox Library, as a rule rich in such prints, has only reproductions to show.