The towering silhouette of the lone trombonist and the strong horizontal and vertical definition of shallow space mark Georges Seurat's first nocturnal painting, Circus Side Show (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), as mysterious and complex, qualities that it shares with this preparatory drawing for the center third of the final composition. The immobile, self-contained figures paradoxically suggest silence rather than gay circus music, while the emphatic placement of every element in the composition gives a strange weight and timelessness to a fleeting moment of entertainment. Seurat's method of drawing without lines formed an empirical equivalent to his scientifically based pointillist paintings, in which he juxtaposed dots of pure colors that blended optically to produce another color. In this and his other drawings Seurat used black conté crayon on a textured paper to create a luminous ambience against which dark figures and objects were silhouetted. The white of the paper generally creates the highlights, but occasionally Seurat points up significant elements with white chalk, as he does with the long loop of the trombone that stands out against the musician's dark costume. Innis Howe Shoemaker, from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections (1995), p. 229.