Le Chahut

In 1887-90 Seurat was working on the Circus Parade, Le Chahut and the not quite finished Circus. It was a Degas world. The effects of stage lighting, overlapping and cropped foreground figures, and a certain malice in the grotesque way types of people or posture are presented, are related to Degas. However, the differences are greater: a sense of ceremony accompanied by distortions and grimaces, motion arrested in mechanical parallel attitudes, a strict patterning of spaces, and an emphatically enigmatic flavour despite the seemingly straightforward attention-getting.