The Circus Parade (Study)

Painted in 1887 and now in the Bührle Collection in Zurich, this study for 'La Parade de cirque' (The Circus Sideshow, 1887–88, Metropolitan Museum of Art) records Seurat's preliminary thinking for his first major nocturnal composition. La Parade depicts the outdoor performance staged in front of a circus tent to attract paying customers—a fairground subject with deep roots in French popular culture. Seurat was drawn to the artificial gaslight of the evening performance as a scientific problem: how to render artificial illumination through his divisionist colour system, where the yellow-orange of gas differs fundamentally from the blue-white of daylight.

The study establishes the essential compositional framework of the final canvas: the horizontal frieze of performers under gas illumination, the silhouetted audience below. The artificial light is rendered through warm yellow-orange tones that dominate the colour scheme, contrasting with the cooler sky.