Circus Sideshow (Parade de cirque) (Full)

About this work

Artist

Georges Seurat (1859–1891)

Year

1887–88

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

99.7 × 149.9 cm

Collection

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Movement

Post-Impressionism

A trombonist stands on a stage under a row of gas jets, flanked by musicians, a ringmaster and a clown, while a crowd in hats and bowlers waits below and a queue climbs the stairs to the box office at the right. This is the free parade staged outside the tent of the Circus Corvi at the Gingerbread Fair near the place de la Nation in eastern Paris in the spring of 1887, meant to lure passers-by into buying tickets. Seurat painted it over the winter of 1887–88 in his pointillist technique, the first nocturne and the first scene of popular entertainment in his work, and showed it at the Salon des Indépendants in 1888. The composition is ruled by horizontals and verticals and lit by artificial light, which gives it a stillness like an Egyptian relief. Stephen C. Clark bequeathed it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1960.

This print reproduces the whole work, uncropped, from a high-resolution scan of the original. The original is in the public domain.