Le Chahut (Studio I)

In 1889, while Paris filled with visitors for the World's Fair and the new Eiffel Tower, Seurat spent his nights watching the cheap dance halls where a rowdy high-kicking number called the chahut drew the crowds. He did not want to catch the fun by instinct. Following a theory then circulating in Paris, he believed a line tilted upward reads to the eye as joy, so he set out to engineer gaiety on purpose. Infrared photographs show he first ruled a grid across this canvas, then aimed almost everything upward, the dancers' legs, their shoes, the ends of their smiles, the neck of the bass in the pit. This is his working study for a larger picture. Seurat died suddenly in 1891, only 31, and the finished Chahut was among the last things he made.