A parade de cirque was the free show. The band and the acrobats came out onto a platform in front of the tent, played for nothing, and the crowd that gathered had to decide whether to buy a ticket for whatever was inside. Seurat painted the deciding.
The ticket window is in the corner
The fair was the Cirque Corvi, an itinerant outfit that set up at the place de la Nation in eastern Paris. Seurat wrote the proprietor's name, Fernand Corvi, on one of the studies, so the show has a manager and an address.
Down in the bottom right corner the business is there: a man and a woman at a ticket window, with five yellow-white globes burning behind them from the lamps inside. The crowd in front of the platform is a row of hats and shoulders, small and dark, every one of them with its back to you.
Nobody on the platform is playing to that crowd. The trombone player stands on a pedestal several metres out in front of the stage, in shadow, lit from behind rather than from the front, facing the dark. It is a performance aimed at no one in particular, which is what a free sample looks like in any century.
Nine gas jets, and nothing else
This was Seurat's first night scene and his first picture of popular entertainment. Everything in it is lit by nine gas jets along the top of the platform, each with a blue-violet edge, and the canvas is just under five feet across.
He built it out of small separate touches of colour laid side by side rather than mixed on a palette. On a daylight subject that reads as shimmer. On a gas-lit stage it does something else: the light stops falling from a lamp and starts hanging in the air, which is what gaslight did to a room.
The figures went flat to match. The platform runs straight across the picture like a frieze, the stairs cut up through the middle, and the trombone player is a vertical black shape in front of all of it. The circus, the music hall and the can-can he painted for the rest of his short working life start on this platform.
1888, and then 1990
It went up at the Salon des Indépendants in 1888 as catalogue number 614, in the same room as the much larger Les Poseuses, and it was the one people walked past. The critic Gustave Kahn called it wilfully pallid and sad. Three years later Seurat was dead, at thirty-one.
Then in 1990 the Metropolitan Museum did the obvious thing and looked at the painting under light the colour of gaslight. Faces that had always looked unnaturally orange went flesh-coloured. Shadows that had always read as bright ultramarine blue went black. The whole canvas glowed as though it were lit from behind.
So it has been judged for a century under the wrong lamp. In daylight, or under a bulb, it does look pallid and sad, exactly as Kahn said. It was never made for either.
Painted for gaslight, looked at ever since under something else. The trombone player will not mind your kitchen.
Some stories are better over a coffee. Fifteen minutes with someone — audio only, not open yet.