A parade, the free entertainment offered at the entrance of a traveling theater, is intended to attract a crowd and encourage the sale of tickets. Seurat painted this extraordinary work during six months in 1887–88 and showed it at the fourth exhibition of the Société des Artistes Indépendants in 1888. It was his first attempt to render the effects of artificial light at night using the Pointillist technique and seems to have been inspired by a lecture on artificial light by James McNeill Whistler that was translated into French and published by the poet Stéphane Mallarmé. Seurat achieved an unprecedented effect in the rendering of the illumination from the row of gas jets. Circus Sideshow is also Seurat's first systematic application of the scientific theories of Charles Henry (1859–1926) regarding the relationship between aesthetics and the physiology and psychology of the senses. By 1890, Seurat had formulated an aesthetic based on these theories that explains his intentions in Circus Sideshow: "Art is Harmony. Harmony is the analogy of contrary and similar elements of tone, of color, and of line, considered according to their dominants and under the influence of light, in gay, calm, or sad combinations. … Gaiety of tone is given by the luminous dominant; of color, by the warm dominant; of line, by lines above the horizontal."

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