2-725-104 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

Café-concert, 1887-1888. 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. Eight drawings by Seurat showing café-concerts exist, some depicting known establishments. Cleveland's 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 startling effect.