Description
Le Chahut – a hand-painted reproduction of Seurat’s painting
Le Chahut is one of Seurat’s last large canvases, painted between 1889 and 1890, and among our paintings on canvas it is the most musical: four legs rising together on the stage of a café-concert. The original is held by the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo. Ours is made as a hand-painted painting, oil on canvas, dot by dot.
What is on the canvas
Two women and two men lift the right leg at the same instant, seen from below and at an angle, as a spectator in the front row would see them. At the lower left the double-bass player is cut off by the edge of the picture and gives us the point of view. At the right a man in a top hat watches. Everything rises: the legs, the ribbons, the curled moustache of the musician, the corners of the mouths. The colours are gaslight yellows, oranges and pinks against blue and violet shadows, and the dots are broader than in the earlier work because the canvas is large and meant to be read from a distance.
The line that rises
In his last years Seurat worked with the idea that a direction can produce an emotion: lines that rise for gaiety, horizontals for calm, falling lines for sadness. Here almost nothing falls. He studied and collected the posters of Jules Chéret, and the construction in diagonals and the near-photographic cropping come from them. The musician’s moustache repeats the curve of the dancer’s smiling lip; the ribbons on the shoulders repeat those on the shoes. It is a painting built on a single shape, repeated everywhere.
A note on the original
The original is oil on canvas, painted in 1889–90 and held by the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, inventory KM 107.757. We state width first and then height, and the table below gives the measurements in that order. It is a tall canvas and a large one: at our bigger sizes it keeps the breathing room the original has.
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 cheerful, high-contrast picture, so it suits a room people pass through, a dining room, or a space where guests are received. The warm yellows also let it sit against a dark wall. 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: | 1889-1890 |
| Original size: | 141 cm x 170 cm |
| Painting style: | Pointillism |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located: | Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo |
1889 and 1890 are Seurat’s Paris years: the café-concert, the circus, the newly built tower. This shelf also carries The Eiffel Tower, painted in the same months, and the large Sunday on the island where it all began.
