Gavarni and Daumier remained in the significant comedy, too flattering and self-indulgent for one, insufficiently ferocious for the other, of Marivaux or Molière. Guys, in his own way, was a caricaturist, as was Baudelaire himself, in his own Guys-style drawings. Delacroix is the romantic and the modern, but Baudelaire is looking for something else: the duality of the comic and the caricature, knife and wound, executioner and victim, expression of superiority and inferiority. The city is the site of comedy tending towards the absolute, as it exaggerates and disproportionates everything, horror and ecstasy.
But between Gavarni and Daumier, the caricaturists, and Guys, the painter of modern life, there was yet another contender for the title of painter of modern life: Charles Meryon. This engraver, an exact contemporary of Baudelaire, was able to claim this role, no longer as a painter of manners, but as a painter of the urban landscape. In the Salon of 1859, after speaking of boudin in connection with Paysage, Baudelaire called for an urban landscape: "It's not only marine paintings that are lacking, a genre that is so poetic! (I don't take for marines military dramas played out on the water), but also a genre that I would gladly call the landscape of great cities, that is, the collection of the grandeur and beauty that result from a powerful agglomeration of men and monuments, the profound and complicated charm of a capital aged and aged in the glories and tribulations of life." Meryon and Baudelaire were to meet, moreover, and embark on a joint project for an album of engravings accompanied by texts in verse and prose. These texts for Meryon are a possible starting point for Le Spleen de Paris . But Meryon is a great paranoid, and Baudelaire experiences true madness with him. Baudelaire's stated aim for these prose poems was to offer "philosophical reveries of a Parisian flâneur", but the project remained unfulfilled, given the excessive demands of the eccentric and enlightened artist.
Finally, it's surprising that Baudelaire didn't choose Manet as the painter of modern life. The essayist didn't recognize him as such, deeming him neither comic nor fantastic, neither "singular" nor "bizarre". According to P. Rebeyrol, it was Baudelaire's attachment to Delacroix, his fixation on Delacroix, and the confusion of Romanticism and modernity, that prevented him from understanding Manet, but also Daumier (the painter) and Courbet.
