Édouard Manet
Hello, it's Zuzanna, CEO and founder of DailyArt. Today it is my birthday, so as in the past 8 years of the DailyArt app, I wanted to share with you one of my favorite paintings and words of gratefulness—thank you for being with DailyArt! We also have some promos for our products, which you can read about below. Sorry for this long introduction! Time for a painting now ... be warned, though, it will be melancholic! :)
A Bar at the Folies-Bergère is the last major work of the realist master, Édouard Manet. It depicts a scene in the Folies Bergère nightclub in Paris, it is a detailed representation of a contemporary scene. The sad barmaid stands before a mirror, although critics—accusing Manet of ignorance of perspective and alleging various impossibilities in the painting—have debated this point since the earliest reviews were published. The presence of the mirror has been crucial for many modern interpreters. It provides a meaningful parallel with Las Meninas, a masterpiece by an artist Manet admired, Diego Velázquez.
Also, the painting is rich in details that provide clues to social class and milieu. The woman at the bar is a real person, known as Suzon, who worked at the Folies-Bergère in the early 1880s. For his painting, Manet posed her in his studio. By including a dish of oranges in the foreground, Manet identifies the barmaid as a prostitute, according to scholars who claim that Manet habitually associated oranges with prostitution in his paintings.
Other notable details include the pair of green feet in the upper left-hand corner, which belong to a trapeze artist who is performing above the restaurant's patrons. The beer bottles depicted are easily identified by the red triangle on the label as Bass Pale Ale, and the conspicuous presence of this English brand instead of German beer has been interpreted as documentation of anti-German sentiment in France in the decade after the Franco-Prussian War.
P.S. If you want to discover more hidden details of this painting, click here!
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