“Parade de Cirque (Circus Sideshow)” by Georges Seurat
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Corvi Circus was one of the main attraction of the Gingerbread Fair (“Foire au pain d’épice”) that was held each year in Paris, for a few weeks around Easter, circa 1887.
The circus sideshow act pictured in Georges Seurat’s “Parade de cirque (Circus Sideshow)”, featured a solo clarinetist up front, trying to draw the attention of passersby, with a band playing behind him and the ringmaster Ferdinand Corvi (on the right, with a cane) enticing the audience to purchase tickets.
The Gingerbread Fair took place at Place de la Nation, a formerly working-class neighbourhood in Paris, France; currently, some kind of communist/satanist roundabout.
The Corvi Circus was known more for its animal acts. Those included a goat balancing on a ball, a goat balancing on a bottle, dogs balancing on balls… a lot of balancing on things, to be honest. 🐐
In the initial sketches for this paining, Seurat even included some animals standing by the ringmaster, but he scrubbed all evidence of that by the time the final painting was taking shape.
The photos of the sideshow, taken at the same fair that Seurat attended, reflect some elements that we can recognize in the painting. Though everyone is pictured much thinner.
Georges Seurat by all accounts seems to have been a remarkably boring genius. Borne out of classical art education and study of old masters, in his 20s Seurat got obsessed with the theory of color and contrast that eventually coalesced into what is now known as neo-impressionism and pointillism.
Noted in “Neo-Impressionist Color Theory“ by Dr. Charles Cramer & Dr. Kim Grant: “As any painter quickly realizes, whenever you blend two pigments, the resulting mixture is duller than either of the original pigments. Rather than mixing colors on the palette, the Neo-Impressionists would juxtapose them on the canvas in small dots. Seen from a suitable distance, these dots mix in the eye, and achieve the intended effects without losing the color intensity of the original pigments.”
Together with Paul Signac, Georges Seurat developed this painting technique in 1886 and he would often swing into paranoid moods and delusions believing that everyone was out to steal his new ideas (which doesn’t necessarily mean that they weren’t).
“He had a theory of how painting should be created and how color should be dealt with, and that it could be dealt with within the studio, according to the formula that everything can be ordered in advance. That is how Seurat is viewed, as a sublime theorists of a new art.” — Writer David Sweetman
“Let’s go and get drunk on light again — it has the power to console.” — Georges Seurat
By the time he was 25, Seurat already painted two of his most audacious and well known pieces: “Bathers at Asnières” and “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte”
“Circus Sideshow”, painted some 3 years later, was only his forth major painting, and first featuring scenes of nighttime entertainment that he would continue painting until his death at 31.
Not to put too fine of a point, but here’s an interesting observation I just had… Two of his first major paintings mentioned above are often treated as a pair: with “Bathers” depicting the working class congregating on the left side of the river, while “Sunday Afternoon” has the bourgeoise picnicking on the right.
It is then interesting to study the silhouettes of the crowd congregating in the front of the “Circus Sideshow” and how the simple hats and bare heads of the working class audience are also gathered on the left, while the crowd on the right features top hats and fancy ladies headwear.
Just an observation 🤔
Now for the depressing part…
Having never married, Seurat nevertheless moved-in with his girlfriend (I guess at in that age she was called his ‘mistress’) Madeleine Knobloch in 1889, and they lived together in his studio in Paris — in a building that is now a home of some basic ‘Benjamin’ clothing store on the ground floor.
A year later, their son was born.
Yet not a year has passed when George Seurat fell ill with some combination of meningitis, pneumonia, infectious angina, and diphtheria, and died at the age of 31. Two weeks later his son has died. Shortly after, Madeleine, who has been pregnant during all this, gave birth to a child. Who has also died shortly after birth. Madeleine survived them all for another 10 years.
At the time that “Circus Sideshow” was exhibited in the Salon de la Société des Artistes Indépendants, it was viewed as one of the least admired and worst reviewed paintings at the exhibition.
And yet over time it has grown in the public conscience to become one of the most well known and loved of Seurat’s works… and has come to represent the grand melancholy of the entertainment industry; of poor and wretched putting on a mask and putting on a show to entertain those with some coin to spare.
“So willfully pallid and sad”
—French poet Gustave Kahn
“No amount of geometry can hide the fact that this picture offers a criticism of society. But the criticism is a poet’s, not a politician’s.”
— Art historian John Russel
“This is of course the central, crucial work in Seurat’s oeuvre. It is the one where the theory gets dropped aside and this other, this seething, difficult, complex man comes bubbling through.
These people, taking part in this paining are representatives of all that’s going wrong with these new industrialized cities in Europe. They are in their finery, they are trying to do their performance, but underneath there’s the sadness, the hunger, the loneliness, the distress, the poverty of the street performer.
And it is the most awful picture, the most awful vision of this modern world.”
— Writer David Sweetman
Where to Find It?
And it’s usually on display at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Gallery 825
Museio link: https://www.museio.org/story/seurat's-circus-sideshow-a-hypnotic-work
