Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Edouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère.jpg

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Original – Édouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère
Reason
Édouard Manet's last major work, dating from 1881-82. Griselda Pollock calls it an image of modernity, concerning itself with "unstable reflections and ambivalent identities in a world of commodities and public spectacles". The device of the mirror stretched behind the barmaid borrows from Mary Cassatt's 1879 Woman with a Pearl Necklace in a Loge, a portrait of her terminally ill sister Lydia, while the detail of the fashionably dressed lady holding opera glasses to her eyes is a direct quotation from her 1878 painting At the Opera. One of the commodities on display here was, of course, the barmaid herself. Naturally Cassatt could not frequent such places, but Manet exulted in them. He was to die of syphilis in 1883, some six month after the death of Cassatt's sister Lydia. Berthe Morisot, subject of a celebrated portrait by Manet, was with him at the end, writing to her sister "These last days were very painful; poor Édouard suffered atrociously. His agony was horrible. In a word, it was death in one of its most appalling forms ...".
Articles in which this image appears
A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, Courtauld Gallery
FP category for this image
Wikipedia:Featured pictures/Artwork/Paintings
Creator
Édouard Manet

Not Promoted --Armbrust The Homunculus 16:46, 4 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]