Le Chahut

Seurat finished this in 1890, painting the loud, provocative cancan of a Paris dance hall using the most patient, controlled method imaginable. The whole surface is built from tiny separate dots of colour, laid side by side so your eye mixes them. It is a strange pairing, the rowdiest dance in the city rendered dot by dot over many months. Look at how everything tilts up and to the right, the dancers' legs, the ends of moustaches, the bow of the double bass in the lower corner, all lifting on the same rising angle. Seurat believed upward lines read as cheerful, and he engineered the gaiety on purpose. Critics argued about it hard when it was shown, and younger painters kept studying it long after. He would be dead within a year, at thirty one.