The Circus (Study)

This is a study for Le Cirque, the last painting Georges Seurat worked on. He built the scene around a bareback rider balanced on a cantering horse at a Paris circus, a clown and ringmaster in front, tiers of spectators banked up behind. Seurat was putting into practice theories he had read about how lines and colours act on the eye, the upward curves meant to read as light and gay. In the spring of 1891 he showed the large final canvas at the Salon des Independants, still unfinished, and died a few days later of an infection, only 31. This smaller study sets out that whole arrangement in rapid, deliberate touches of colour, the plan for a picture he never got to complete.