Explore the Background and reception of this artwork.
Itinerant fairs housed in temporary structures such as the Circus Corvi  made seasonal appearances along the boulevards of Paris. Seurat's interest in these fairs produced several studies in anticipation of Parade de cirque, including a series of cafe-concert performances, performing saltimbanques or acrobats. The name Fernand Corvi appears on Seurat's small sketch for the ticket window.Gustave Kahn characterized Parade de cirque as "so willfully pallid and sad". The painting was overshadowed by the much larger Models (Les Poseuses) when first exhibited at the 1888 Salon des Indépendants. Subsequently neglected by Seurat himself, Parade was not included among the large canvases listed in his "ésthetique" of 1890.Robert Herbert writes of Parade:Falling uneasily between the huge, early plein-air paintings Baignade and La Grande Jatte and the late indoor scenes Chahut and Cirque, Parade has neither the grandeur of the former nor the posterlike memorability of the latter. Yet it nonetheless demands a central role in Seurat's concise oeuvre. Not only is it his first painting of a nocturnal scene and therefore an important stage in the development of the artist's new "chrono-luminarist" style, it is also his first painting to depict the performance of a popular entertainment, a genre—already developed in drawings—that would dominate the artist's large projects for the remainder of his brief career. Apart from issues of chronological priority, however, Parade also distinguishes itself as Seurat's most mysterious painting, a brooding masterpiece that reveals its meaning reluctantly, a disarmingly simple geometrical schema that conceals a complex spatial arrangement... The evocative depiction of ethereal, penumbral light is unquestionably the key feature of Seurat's Parade.
With respect to the peculiar mood and appearance of Parade, art historian John Russell has proposed a literary inspiration, as opposed to a political or scientific basis; citing Arthur Rimbaud's poem a La parade, published in the Symbolist review La vogue, 13 May 1886. It had long been believed that Charles Henry's theories on the emotional and symbolic expression of lines, shapes and colors were at the root of Parade. Though, it wasn't until the 1890 exhibition of Le Chahut (two year after the completion of Parade) that critics remarked on a connection between the work of Seurat and the theories of Henry."No amount of geometry", write's Russell, "can hide the fact that this picture offers a criticism of society. But the criticism is a poet's not a politician's." If this were the case, Herbert points out, "it is unclear what the artist's message was." The subjects appear to be ordinary middle and working class spectator's and performers, without caricature of the type produced by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec or 19th century satirists such as Paul Gavarni or Honoré Daumier.Mirroring Seurat's work, Rimbaud writes of the circus sideshow as a reflection of contemporary life: "their bantering or their terror lasts one minute, or whole months." Robert Herbert suggested an alternative poem that more closely parallels the mood of Parade, Jules Laforgue's Soir de carnaval: "Oh, life is too sad, incurably sad / At festivals here and there I have always sobbed: / 'Vanity, vanity, all is only vanity!' /—Then I think: where are the ashes of the psalmist?" Seurat almost certainly knew both poems, writes Herbert, "and either—or both—could have inspired him."Art historian Roger Fry, commenting on the unforeseen mystery of Parade, compared it to the paintings of Lautrec:Toulouse-Lautrec would have seized at once on all that was significant of the moral atmosphere, would have seized most of all on what satisfied his slightly morbid relish of depravity... But Seurat, one feels, saw it almost as one might suppose some visitant from another planet would have done. He saw it with this penetrating exactness of a gaze vacant of all direct understanding... Each figure seems to be so perfectly enclosed within its simplified contour, for, however precise and detailed Seurat is, his passion for geometricizing never deserts him—enclosed so completely, so shut off in its partition, that no other relation than a spatial and geometrical one is any longer possible. The syntax of actual life has been broken up and replaced by Seurat's own peculiar syntax with all its strange, remote and unforeseen implications.
André Salmon included this painting among other works by Seurat that were misunderstood by his contemporaries and which demonstrated "profound intention".
Roger Fry André Salmon Gustave Kahn Baignade Models Arthur Rimbaud Paul Gavarni Le Chahut Charles Henry Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec Jules Laforgue Chahut Cirque La Grande Jatte Honoré Daumier chrono-luminarist Salon des Indépendants