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

Édouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère
Voting period ends on 4 Aug 2014  at 16:39:34 (UTC)
 * 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:Featured pictures/Artwork/Paintings
 * Creator:Édouard Manet


 * Support as nominator – Coat of Many Colours (talk) 16:39, 25 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Comment — I've always liked this one. However, as with certain other familiar paintings, I wonder if it's lost some appeal due to frequent reproduction in mass media. Sca (talk) 13:45, 26 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes well, 'iconic' is a word you see frequently in the descriptions. I don't see it loses its EV merely because it's familiar. Coat of Many Colours (talk) 14:13, 26 July 2014 (UTC)

--Armbrust The Homunculus 16:46, 4 August 2014 (UTC)