She faces straight out of the picture. Her reflection stands well to the right of where it should be, leaning in towards a man in a top hat who is not in front of the bar at all. The mirror shows a conversation that, from where you are standing, is not happening. Manet did it on purpose.
What else is out of place
The barmaid is not the only thing in the wrong position. The bottles at the left end of the counter do not match their reflections either, and the Courtauld, which owns the painting, states plainly that the shift was deliberate.
Now the top left corner. Two legs in green boots hang in the air. That is a trapeze artist, cropped to the feet, and it is the only thing in the painting that tells you what sort of building this is.
Then the counter itself: champagne in the cooler, red wine, a green bottle of crème de menthe, and two bottles of Bass pale ale with the red triangle on the label. That triangle had been registered in 1876 as the first trade mark in Britain. Six years later it is sitting at the front of a painting at the Paris Salon, legible from across the room.
Suzon, in a studio
The Folies-Bergère was a music hall on the rue Richer with a promenade behind the bars where people went to be seen and to find each other. Manet knew it and drew there.
The painting itself was made somewhere else. In his studio on the rue d'Amsterdam he set up a marble-topped table with the bottles on it, and a barmaid from the Folies called Suzon came and stood behind it. The crowd, the mirror, the lights and the trapeze were all assembled afterwards. That is why the reflection can be wrong without being a mistake: there was no mirror to get right.
Her expression has been called bored, sad, insolent, exhausted and empty, in print, for a hundred and forty years. What she is actually doing is simple. She is looking out at whoever is in front of her, and not at the man her reflection is talking to.
The last one
He showed it at the Salon in 1882 and he was already very ill. By then he was in constant pain, could not stand for long and worked sitting down. His left foot was amputated in April 1883 and he died later the same month, at fifty-one.
The canvas is 96 by 130 centimetres, which is smaller than it photographs. Samuel Courtauld bought it in March 1926 and gave it to the institute that carries his name in 1934, so it has been in London for a century.
And the argument has not stopped. Every generation of painters and writers has another go at the geometry — where you must be standing, what the mirror can and cannot show, whether the man in the hat is you. Manet left no note about any of it.
Painters have argued about the mirror since 1882. Wherever you sit, the man in the top hat stands in your place, and she is not looking at him.
Some stories are better over a coffee. Fifteen minutes with someone — audio only, not open yet.