1888
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
At the Concert Parisien is a 1888 by Georges Seurat, a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a crowd at a café-concert in Paris. A woman sings on stage while men in hats listen. The artist drew this from a unique angle, looking through the men’s hats. Seurat used a waxy black crayon. The lines are sharp but soft. It feels like a snapshot, not a posed scene. Look for more works by Georges Seurat (French, 1859–1891) at The Cleveland Museum of Art.
Café-concerts were popular places of entertainment for the middle classes in Paris during the late 1800s and usually featured singers or other forms of vaudeville entertainers. Georges Seurat created eight drawings depicting café-concerts, some showing known establishments. This drawing has an innovative viewpoint, in which we peer through the bowler hats of male viewers listening to a female singer on stage. Seurat typically used a black crayon manufactured by the Conté company, and its waxy quality allowed him to exploit the texture of paper to striking effect.
Despite Georges Seurat's brief lifespan, he created a large number of drawings, working almost exclusively with the waxy Conté crayon and textured paper used for this sheet.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Georges Pierre Seurat (UK: SUR-ah, -ə, US: suu-RAH; French: ; 2 December 1859 – 29 March 1891) was a French post-Impressionist artist.
See the richer artist page
