A Bar at the Folies-Bergere

A barmaid stands behind a marble counter of champagne bottles, oranges, and roses, her gaze weary and unreachable, while the glittering crowd of the Folies-Bergère — and, impossibly, her own displaced reflection conversing with a top-hatted customer — fills the mirror behind her. Manet painted it in 1882, already ill, working from Suzon, a barmaid at the actual nightclub; it was his last major work. Its deliberately wrong mirror has fed more than a century of argument, and its detached urban loneliness looks forward to Hopper. It hangs in the Courtauld Gallery, London.