Profession: illustrator

Guys’ significance may have faded, were it not for his role as the quintessential modern figure in Baudelaire’s essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life.’ But he was interestingly influential; his friends Manet and Baudelaire collected his work, Seurat treasured one piece, and Daumier (with whom he worked under Gavarni) and Delacroix both admired him. Fiercely private (he forbade Baudelaire to identify him by name, and berated Thackeray for the praise he’d printed), little is known of his life’s detail. Nadar was his most faithful friend in a circle of artists and writers; the Goncourts also knew and wrote fictionally about him.

Doré was one of the most influential illustrators of the 19th C. Grandville met him as a youthful prodigy. Zola knew him when both worked for the publisher Hachette. Nadar was a close friend; he collected Doré’s work, photographing him several times, including on his death-bed. Gautier, another good friend (among several whose work Doré illustrated), travelled to Spain with him. Liszt and Saint-Saëns — also among the music-loving Doré’s friends — played for him together. He knew Wagner, was devoted to Rossini (calling in to draw him the day after his death), and counted Bernhardt among his lovers.

Dickens and Browne were friends as well as close collaborators. Dickens took him on in person — Thackeray also applied, and helped Browne celebrate by taking him out for a dinner of sausages and stout. Dickens and Browne travelled everywhere together in the early years of their long working relationship, and played battledore and shuttlecock together. His illustrations for many of Dickens’ best-known novels did much to shape the public perception of the characters. When Browne took over illustrating the serialised ‘Pickwick Papers’, sales increased a hundred-fold. Eventually, after 23 years, they drifted apart.

Cruikshank taught the novelist (and his good friend and admirer) Thackeray etching; Thackeray helped him out with money and wrote about him. He worked closely with Dickens, acting in his amateur theatre company and establishing for later generations the look of the times through his work on Oliver Twist in particular; though 20 years of friendship was destroyed by their quarrel about creative control and through the heavy drinker Cruikshank’s conversion to fanatical teetotalism. Ruskin, a friend, championed his work. Cruikshank told Mayhew, another collaborator, that he’d modelled Fagin’s expression on his own.