At the Concert Parisien

Dense layers of conté crayon build the packed silhouettes of the audience at the Concert Parisien, facing a stage whose pale light breaks the surrounding dark. Made in the late 1880s, this drawing belongs to the series of café-concert and music-hall studies in which Seurat worked out his mature tonal method in monochrome before turning to the divisions of colour in his oils. His control of the crayon — velvet blacks rising to the white of the paper for the footlights — made these conté drawings among the most admired works he produced before his early death in 1891.