A line of dancers, women in pink skirts and tall feathered hats alternating with men in dark jackets, kick up their legs on a stage lit by lamps at the upper left. The nearest woman holds her skirt out to one side with a raised hand, her eyes closed and her head thrown back. Below them a conductor seen from behind faces the stage, with a double bass player beside him and a man in a hat looking up from the lower right.

The picture is built of tiny dots of color. The chahut is the cancan, a risqué dance in which the women lift their skirts and wave their legs in the air. The Kröller-Müller Museum says the dancers look more like archetypes than people of flesh and blood, and no one is named. Georges Seurat completed it in 1890 as an experiment in applying his color theories, using only seven colors in small dabs. Every line points upward on purpose, the museum says: the dancers' legs, the conductor's hand, the men's mustaches, the neck of the double bass, even the flowers in the background.

Helene Kröller-Müller wrote that no painting had gripped her so strongly in a long time. It is in the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo.