The Circus

Seurat hung this at the Salon des Independants in March 1891 while it was still unfinished, and a few days later he was dead, only 31. Look at the edges and you can still see the bare canvas and the grid of blue lines he used to plan the composition, the scaffolding of a picture he never got to complete. The scene is the Cirque Fernando in Montmartre, a bareback rider balanced on a galloping white horse, a clown's back filling the foreground. Seurat built it entirely from small separate dabs of colour meant to mix in your eye, and he was applying fashionable new theories about how rising lines and warm colours read as cheerful and lively. It was the third and last of his big circus and dance-hall paintings.