Circus Sideshow (Parade de cirque)

When it was painted

In 1887, Seurat was twenty-seven. A year earlier he had shown A Sunday on La Grande Jatte at the last Impressionist exhibition, and Paris was still arguing about his new way of painting in tiny dots of color.

The setting here is the Gingerbread Fair near the Place de la Nation, on the eastern side of Paris. Every year, just after Easter, it ran for about three weeks, and the Circus Corvi pitched its tent there. A parade, in French, was a free teaser show performed outside. The idea was simple: get people walking by to stop, watch, and buy a ticket to go inside.

Seurat showed this canvas at the Salon des Indépendants in the spring of 1888. He kept returning to nighttime entertainment after that. In March 1891, while his last large painting, The Circus, hung unfinished at the Indépendants, he fell suddenly ill and died. He was thirty-one.

Seurat kept his private life almost completely hidden. He lived with Madeleine Knobloch, and they had a son born in 1890, but his family learned about them only shortly before he died. The little boy died soon afterward.

The painting later belonged to the American collector Stephen C. Clark, who left it to the Metropolitan Museum in his will in 1960. In 2017 the museum built a whole exhibition around it, gathering Seurat's drawings for the scene.

Now look again at the backs of the people standing under the gas jets. The real show inside the tent never appears in the picture. Like that crowd, we are left at the entrance with only the teaser.