Description
Invitation to the Sideshow (La Parade de Cirque) – a hand-painted reproduction of Seurat’s painting
La Parade de Cirque is Seurat’s night picture, painted at the end of the 1880s, and among our paintings on canvas it is the quietest large work he made: a free sideshow performance outside a travelling circus, lit by gas. The original is held by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, accession 61.101.17, where it is catalogued as Circus Sideshow. Ours is made as a hand-painted painting, oil on canvas.
What is on the canvas
A trombone player stands alone at the centre on a low platform, seen straight on, almost in silhouette. Behind him a row of musicians is compressed into a dark band; to the right the ringmaster stands beside a rail, and below, the backs and hats of the crowd run along the bottom edge like a frieze. Nine gas jets burn in a line across the top and set the whole colour of the picture: yellow-orange light against blue and violet dark. Nobody moves. It is a performance painted as stillness.
A picture built like architecture
This is the most deliberately constructed of Seurat’s large paintings. The verticals of the trombonist, the rail and the trees divide the canvas into intervals; the horizontals of the platform, the gas jets and the crowd cross them. Contemporaries noticed that the proportions look measured rather than observed, and that is the point: Seurat was interested in whether harmony could be built the way a composer builds it, out of intervals rather than out of drawing. The dots are fine and even, so the light seems to hang in the air rather than fall from a source.
A note on the original
The original is oil on canvas and belongs to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, accession 61.101.17. We state width first and then height, and the table below gives the measurements in that order — it is a wide picture, about half as tall again as it is high. The Met dates it to the late 1880s, in the years between the Grande Jatte and the circus pictures.
What you receive
The painting is made by our painter by hand, oil on canvas, in the size you choose, and to your own measurements if you prefer. It is a dark picture with a warm light running through it, so it holds a wall in a room that is already dim rather than fighting a bright one, and the wide shape suits the space above a sideboard or a long sofa. When the canvas is finished we photograph it and send you the picture for approval before it leaves the studio. You choose the frame in our 3D application. Every artwork we sell is hand-painted and never printed.
| Year of creation: | 1887-1888 |
| Original size: | 149.9 cm x 99.7 cm |
| Painting style: | Pointillism |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
The same years produced the café-concert and the tower. This shelf carries Le Chahut, painted immediately after this one, and The Eiffel Tower from the same Paris seasons.
