The Bar

Painted in 1878 and now at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, this bar scene belongs to the series of café and bar subjects that formed the urban social core of Manet's work in the late 1870s. Parisian café and bar culture — the grand cafés of the boulevards, the brasseries, the smaller neighbourhood establishments — were both social spaces Manet frequented and subjects that allowed him to explore the textures of contemporary Parisian life. This canvas anticipates his final masterpiece A Bar at the Folies-Bergère in its focus on a female figure among bottles and glasses.

The bottles and glasses on the bar counter are rendered with the direct, confident touch that makes Manet's still-life passages among the most admired in French painting. The female figure provides a human anchor for the composition of objects. Light plays across glass and liquid with a few precise highlights. The dark background creates the tonal contrast characteristic of Manet's figure-in-interior compositions.