Zirkusparade

This was the first time Seurat painted at night. He had made his name with sunlit afternoons built from tiny dots of colour, and in 1887 he turned instead to a sideshow lit by gas. The scene is the parade outside a travelling circus at a spring fair in eastern Paris, the free teaser act the barkers put on to pull a paying crowd inside. A trombone player stands dead centre under a row of nine little gas flames, and Seurat has laid everything out on a strict grid of verticals, so the whole thing feels frozen and hushed rather than lively. The dots here are mostly muted, violet-grey and orange, the colours of artificial light after dark. When he showed it in 1888 it was among his least liked paintings, thought cold and strange. That stillness, the thing critics disliked, is exactly what later viewers came to find most haunting in it.