A Bar at the Folies-Bergère

Based on Wikipedia: A Bar at the Folies-Bergère

Something is wrong with this painting, and Édouard Manet knew it.

Look at the mirror behind the barmaid. Her reflection drifts impossibly to the right. A man appears in the glass, seemingly mid-conversation with her—yet she stares straight ahead, past us, through us, her expression blank and unreachable. For over a century, critics accused Manet of botching basic perspective, of not understanding how mirrors work. They were wrong. In 2000, researchers built a physical reconstruction of the scene and discovered something remarkable: the painting is geometrically accurate. The trick is that you're not standing where you think you are.

A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, completed in 1882, was the last major work Manet would create before his death the following year. It now hangs in the Courtauld Gallery in London, but it began its life above the piano of Emmanuel Chabrier, a composer and close friend of the artist. The painting measures just over four feet wide, and within that modest frame, Manet packed enough mysteries to fuel scholarly debate for generations.

The Puzzle in the Glass

The central figure is a woman named Suzon. She really existed—a barmaid who worked at the Folies-Bergère, one of Paris's most famous music halls and nightclubs in the 1880s. Manet brought her to his studio to pose, placing her behind a marble counter laden with bottles, oranges, and flowers.

Behind her stretches a massive mirror in a gold frame. And here's where things get strange.

In the reflection, we see the crowded music hall—the glittering chandeliers, the milling patrons, the green-slippered feet of a trapeze artist swinging overhead in the upper left corner. We also see Suzon's back, leaning toward a mustachioed gentleman in a top hat. But in the "real" foreground, Suzon faces us directly, her posture upright, her gaze distant.

The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty once called a mirror "the instrument of a universal magic that changes things into spectacles, spectacles into things, me into others, and others into me." Manet seems to have taken this observation literally. The reflection shows Suzon engaged in commerce, perhaps flirtation. The woman facing us is withdrawn, self-protective, somewhere else entirely.

How can both be true?

The Geometry of Illusion

When researchers finally staged a physical reconstruction in 2000, they discovered that the scene only makes sense if you accept one crucial detail: you are not standing directly in front of the barmaid.

The viewer's position is off to the right, closer to the bar than the gentleman whose reflection we see. That man isn't talking to Suzon at all—he's standing to the left, looking away from her, outside what the painter could see from his vantage point. The intimate conversation that generations of viewers assumed was happening? An optical trick. A misreading caused by our assumption that we stand at the center of every picture we view.

Manet's preliminary sketch placed Suzon off to the right side of the canvas. In the final painting, he moved her to the center but kept her reflection where it was. This wasn't incompetence. It was a deliberate fracturing of the expected relationship between viewer, subject, and reflection.

This technique places A Bar at the Folies-Bergère in conversation with one of art history's most analyzed paintings: Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez, the seventeenth-century Spanish master Manet deeply admired. Both paintings play games with mirrors and viewpoints. Both make the viewer conscious of their own position in space. The philosopher Michel Foucault devoted the opening chapter of his influential 1966 book The Order of Things to unpacking the implications of Velázquez's mirror games. Manet, working two centuries later, may have been offering his own response.

The Meanings Hidden in Objects

Manet was a realist, obsessed with capturing contemporary life in all its specificity. Every object in this painting carries weight.

Those bottles with the red triangle? Bass Pale Ale, a British brand. Their presence is deliberately conspicuous—a political statement barely a decade after France's humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. Anti-German sentiment ran high in Paris. Displaying British rather than German beer was a small act of defiance, a thumb in the eye of the victorious Prussians.

The oranges in the foreground seem innocent enough. But art historian Larry L. Ligo has traced a pattern throughout Manet's work: oranges consistently appear in contexts involving prostitution. Combined with the setting—the Folies-Bergère was notorious as a place where men could purchase more than drinks—the fruit becomes a signal.

T. J. Clark, another art historian, puts it bluntly: the barmaid is "intended to represent one of the prostitutes for which the Folies-Bergère was well-known." She is "both a salesperson and a commodity—something to be purchased along with a drink." That blank expression takes on new meaning in this light. She has made herself absent, retreated to some interior place where the transaction doesn't reach.

The Trapeze Artist's Feet

In the upper left corner, two green-shoed feet dangle into the frame. They belong to a trapeze artist performing high above the restaurant floor. It's easy to miss them, your eye drawn to Suzon's face and the glittering chaos behind her.

But those feet ground us in a specific reality: the Folies-Bergère. This was a music hall, which meant variety acts—acrobats, singers, comedians—performing while patrons drank and socialized below. The atmosphere was raucous, glittering, slightly seedy. The feet remind us that life is happening all around Suzon, above her head, whether she engages with it or not.

Afterlives

Great paintings don't just hang on walls. They echo through culture, getting quoted and subverted and argued over.

In 1934, the choreographer Ninette de Valois created a ballet called Bar aux Folies-Bergère, set to music by Chabrier—the same composer who originally owned the painting. The piece literalized what Manet froze: the barmaid in motion, the patrons swirling around her.

The 1947 film The Private Affairs of Bel Ami recreated the scene with almost archaeological precision—look-alike actress, matching set, carefully positioned props—when characters enter the nightclub twenty-nine minutes in.

In 1954, the Australian artist John Brack painted a work simply called The Bar, depicting a grim Melbourne pub scene. The reference to Manet's painting was ironic, the glitter stripped away, replaced by austere functionality and working-class drinkers.

The 1988 Eddie Murphy comedy Coming to America hung a parody on the wall of the McDowell residence: the barmaids reimagined as dark-skinned women in red dresses, a hamburger replacing the champagne bottles. The joke works only because the original is so recognizable, even to audiences who couldn't name Manet.

Perhaps the most sophisticated response came from Canadian artist Jeff Wall in 1979. His large-format photograph Picture for Women borrows Manet's internal structure—the mirror, the light bulbs, the absorbed female gaze, the shadowy male presence. But Wall places his camera at the center of the composition, visible in the mirror, capturing the act of making the image. Where Manet's position remains mysterious, Wall's is explicit. The photograph becomes a meditation on the relationship between artist, subject, and viewer—on who looks, who is looked at, and who controls the looking.

The Woman Behind the Counter

Suzon herself remains elusive. We know she was real, that she worked at the Folies-Bergère in the early 1880s, that Manet brought her to his studio to pose. Beyond that, she vanishes into history.

Manet was dying when he painted her. Syphilis was destroying his nervous system, making it increasingly difficult to work. A Bar at the Folies-Bergère was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1882, receiving mixed reviews—many critics focused on the perspective "errors" that weren't errors at all. Manet died the following year at age fifty-one.

The painting asks us to look at Suzon, to read meaning into her expression and posture. But it also refuses us full access. The mirror shows one version of her—engaged, transactional. The frontal view shows another—distant, protected, gone. The gentleman in the top hat can approach her reflection. We, standing somewhere off to the right where Manet has placed us, can only see her surface.

Maybe that's the point. The Folies-Bergère sold spectacle and sold flesh. But what went on inside Suzon's head, as she stood behind that counter night after night, dispensing Bass Pale Ale and maintaining her blank composure—that remained her own.

A Note on Mirrors and Meaning

It's worth pausing to appreciate what Manet accomplished technically. Painting a convincing mirror reflection is difficult. Painting a deliberately impossible one that nonetheless feels right—that looks like what a mirror should show, even as it subverts the laws of optics—requires a mastery that critics mistook for incompetence for over a century.

The 2000 reconstruction proved Manet knew exactly what he was doing. But the painting's power doesn't depend on that vindication. Even when viewers assumed the perspective was wrong, they were drawn in, troubled, made to look twice. The disjunction between reflection and reality registered emotionally even when it couldn't be explained geometrically.

Manet built a puzzle box. Whether you solve it or not, you feel its strangeness. A woman faces you, her expression offering nothing. Behind her, in the glass, another version of herself leans toward a customer, performing the transaction that keeps her employed. The painted world and its reflection refuse to align. You can't stand in both places at once. Neither could Suzon. Neither could Manet, working through pain and failing nerves, recording a scene from a nightclub he could no longer easily visit.

The painting hangs now in London, far from Paris and the Folies-Bergère. The music hall itself survived until 1926, then was demolished and rebuilt as a more conventional theater. Suzon, whoever she really was, left no other trace.

But every day, visitors to the Courtauld Gallery stand before that marble counter, trying to figure out where they are—in the picture, in relation to the barmaid, in the strange space Manet created between the real and the reflected. Most of them have never heard of perspective reconstruction or syphilis or French anti-German sentiment. They just know something is happening here that they can't quite grasp.

That unease is the painting's gift. That, and Suzon's face, staring past all of us, keeping her own counsel, forever.