A Bar at the Folies-Bergère Sharon

Painted in 1881-1882 and now at the Courtauld Gallery in London, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère is Manet's last major painting and his most complex statement about modernity, spectacle, and social alienation. The barmaid stands behind the marble counter of the famous music hall, facing the viewer; behind her an enormous mirror reflects the crowd of the venue and, crucially, a version of the barmaid and her customer that doesn't quite match the direct view. The spatial and perspectival impossibility of the mirror — which shows a reflection at the wrong angle — has generated more scholarly debate than any other 19th-century French painting.

The counter surface is a flat still life of bottles, glasses, and fruit — rendered with Manet's masterly direct touch, each object given exactly the visual weight it requires. The barmaid's face is built with concentrated patches of warm and cool tone, her expression ambiguous between presence and absence. The reflected crowd in the mirror is handled with deliberate looseness contrasting with the sharp resolution of the foreground.