At the Concert Parisien (1887–88): Art, History and Details

At the Concert Parisien (1887–88) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Georges Seurat (French, 1859–1891).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

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.

Object facts

• Title: At the Concert Parisien
• Date: 1887–88
• Creator attribution: Georges Seurat (French, 1859–1891)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: conté crayon heightened with white chalk on cream handmade modern laid paper
• Dimensions: Sheet: 31.4 x 23.6 cm (12 3/8 x 9 5/16 in.)
• Collection: DR - French
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1958.344

A detail from the museum

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.

Collection credit

Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Trente ans d'art indépendant, 1884-1914. Exh. Cat. Paris: Société des artistes indépendants, 1926.
• Seurat: His Drawings. Exh. Cat. New York: Buchholz Gallery, 1947.
• Seligman, Germain. The Drawings of Georges Seurat. New York: Curt Valentin, 1947.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.