Manet & the Mirror of Society.
During the nineteenth-century artists continued to mine the iconography of mirrors and self-portraits, e.g. Eckersbug’s Woman before a Mirror (1841) which is reminiscent of Bellini’s allegories of vanity. The mirror still figures in the image of the artist working as in Wilhelm Bendz’s Young Artist examining a Sketch in a Mirror (1826), but these are private spaces and the century marks the appearance of more paintings of mirrors in large, public arenas. The industrial revolution and the growth of the cities with their music halls, theatres, operas, bars, all marking the new leisure culture provided a new public space for the mirror which painters were not slow to exploit. This is is especially conspicuous in impressionist art which took the city as a major topic including the spectacle of bars and cafes. Works like Gustave Caillebotte’s At the Café shows a man planted stolidly before a mirror in which is reflected other members of his type, possibly journalists or men of letters;1 he seems too scruffy and coarse to be a dandy or boulevardier, but all social classes were to intermingle in the streets and bars of Paris. This painting has been linked to Manet’s much more famous Bar at the Folies Bergère where a whole panorama of social class is on the view in the mirror at the back of the melancholy barmaid.2 If there is such a thing as a mirror of society, then this is it.
1Various, Gustave Caillebote: The Unknown Impressionist, (Royal Academy, 1996), no. 25, 127..
2Ibid.
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