A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, rethought

You are Édouard Manet. In the 1850s you trained in the studio of Thomas Couture, and for twenty years since, your Salon pictures have been mocked as often as admired.

Between 1878 and 1880 you painted a run of café-concert pictures, set at the Brasserie de Reichshoffen on the boulevard Rochechouart: waitresses carrying beer, customers in top hats, a singer glimpsed on a stage. One canvas you cut in two; its halves are now Corner of a Café-Concert in London and Au Café in Winterthur.

In them a working woman stands at the front of a crowded room, busy and looking elsewhere. The bar picture takes that idea to the scale of a Salon painting.

The Folies-Bergère opened in 1869 at 32 rue Richer. It is a music hall with walkways lined with bars, chandeliers and mirrors, and acrobats on the trapeze overhead. A poster of the period boasts that it is lit entirely by electricity. Maupassant, Huysmans and the Goncourts all wrote about it.

You have sent pictures to the Salon for more than twenty years, and in 1881 you finally won a medal, second class. That exempts you from the jury: whatever you send in 1882 will be hung.

One big figure

A near life-size woman seen straight on, close up. In a Salon hung floor to ceiling, a frontal figure stands out. That was your strategy, as the historian John House argued.

A mirror

Put the whole hall behind her as a reflection, so the crowd, the lights and the show are all seen in the glass.

A real bar

A first-floor bar to the right of the stage, according to notes kept by Léon Leenhoff, your wife's son. You will rebuild it in the studio.

You make quick ink sketches at the Folies-Bergère itself: one of the balcony, and one of a barmaid talking to a man, both seen in the mirror. Where those sheets are now has not been traced.

From the second you paint an oil sketch in the studio, about half a metre wide. The barmaid stands at an angle, her hands clasped at her waist; her reflection stands close beside her, where a reflection should be; and the customer, a man in a bowler hat, is your neighbour Henry Dupray, a military painter, according to Leenhoff. Leenhoff dates it to summer 1881; others place it as late as the end of that year.

An X-ray of the sketch shows it was hardly altered: you moved the man and bared a little more of her bosom. You also draw Suzon, the barmaid who will pose for you, in pastel, in a black hat with a pink bouquet.

You paint the picture in your studio at 77 rue d'Amsterdam, where you have worked since April 1879. A restaurant buffet with a marble top is brought in, loaded with bottles, and Suzon, a real barmaid from the Folies-Bergère, poses behind it.

You are ill. Tertiary syphilis has brought on locomotor ataxia, and you often have to paint sitting down; your friend Théodore Duret said you were practically nailed to your chair. You will die on 30 April 1883, a year after the Salon.

The painter Henri Jeanniot visits in January 1882 and finds a pretty girl posing behind a table laden with bottles. Writing long afterwards, he adds that although you painted from life, you were in no way copying nature. Your advice to him is “Pas de pensum!”: painting must never become a chore.

In May 1882 the picture hangs at the Salon, as does your other entry, Jeanne (Spring), a half-length of a young woman with a parasol. Critics like Jeanne better.

The bar puzzles them. In Le Journal amusant the caricaturist Stop redraws it as “a seller of consolation at the Folies-Bergère” and puts the reflections where they ought to be. In L'Art moderne (1883), Joris-Karl Huysmans judges it a flawed masterpiece.

By 1884 the engraver Henri Guérard has etched it, so the composition circulates in print.

Is the reflection possible? Many viewers have said no: she faces you, yet her reflection is off to the right, talking to a man who should be standing where you are. In 2000 and 2001 Malcolm Park showed that a consistent arrangement can be built if the viewer stands off to the right and the man stands outside the picture. Thierry de Duve accepts Park's model but argues that the painting is made to work against what you intuitively see. The question is still argued.

• Samuel Courtauld bought the painting in March 1926 and gave it in 1934. It is in the Courtauld Gallery, London.
• An archive file in the papers of Lord Butler at Trinity College, Cambridge, is titled for the painting's restoration. Its listed items, not checked for this guide, name the restorer Stanley Kennedy North in 1932–33. What he did is unknown.
• No varnish, cleaning or lining record for the painting has been published.