Leaving the Theater
19th century
Constantin Guys, famously dubbed the 'painter of modern life' by poet Charles Baudelaire, perfectly captures the electric atmosphere of 19th-century Parisian nightlife in this lively sketch. We see a fashionable crowd spilling out of a theater, with women in voluminous blue and grey dresses swirling as they chat with dapper gentlemen in dark coats. Guys was a bit of a Bohemian character who preferred sketching from memory in his cluttered studio after observing these scenes in cafes and opera houses, effectively freezing the fleeting, gossipy energy of the city on paper.
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