Un bar en el Folies-Bergère

This was the last major painting Édouard Manet finished, shown at the Paris Salon in 1882, the year before he died. The Folies-Bergère was a huge Paris music hall, all gaslight and champagne and crowds, and behind the barmaid a great mirror throws the whole packed balcony back at us. If you look at the green feet in the top left corner, they belong to a trapeze artist working above the audience. But it is the mirror that has kept people arguing for nearly 150 years. The barmaid stands facing us, still and a little far away, yet her reflection has slid off to the right, where she seems to lean toward a top-hatted man. That gentleman should be standing right where we are, and he is not. Critics at the time accused Manet of not knowing his perspective. In 2000 a researcher rebuilt the whole scene with a live model and cameras and showed the geometry can just about work if the man stands off to one side, out of our view. The barmaid was a real woman named Suzon who worked there, and Manet had her pose in his studio beside a table of real bottles.