Location📍 Kröller-Müller Museum → Now on display

Chahut

The women and men in this painting are enthusiastically dancing the chahut, or cancan, which was considered a risqué dance for that period, characterized by women lifting their skirts and waving their legs in the air.

Despite the energetic subject, Le Chahut is not a fleeting scene captured from the Parisian nightlife, but a painstakingly deliberated painting. Georges Seurat is deeply fascinated by the effect of light and colour, purposefully seeking a systematic method by which to render this visual effect. He has successfully captured the flamboyant dance within a strict system of countless minutely applied dots of paint, lines, and structural colour combinations.

The dancehall is completely bathed in warm colours and glowing artificial light. The dancers appear more as archetypes than people of flesh and blood, moving in a rhythmic repetition. All the lines and movements in the painting are purposefully directed upwards to evoke the excited atmosphere of the dance and the music: the dancers’ legs, the conductor’s hand, the men’s moustaches, the corners of the ladies’ mouths and eyes, the neck of the double bass, and even the decorative flowers in the background.