Description
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.
Provenance
Studio of the artist [1859-1891], Paris (1888-1891); (Galerie Hessel, Paris) (by 1926); (Van Diemen-Lilienfeld Galleries, New York, NY) (after 1926-by 1937); (Buchholz Gallery, New York, NY) (after 1937-by 1944); Alexander Bing [1879-1959], New York, NY (by 1944-1958); (César de Hauke, Paris, sold to the Cleveland Museum of Art) (1958); Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (1958-)
Accession Number
1958.344
Medium
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.)
Classification
Drawing
Credit Line
Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund