Manet Parisian painting up for sale

The painting is a depiction of Parisian nightlife

An 1881 oil painting considered one of the defining images of French impressionism is to be sold at auction later this month.

Edouard Manet’s Le Bar aux Folies-Bergere, which depicts a barmaid at the famous Parisian cabaret, recently featured at the National gallery’s Inventing Impressionism exhibition.

Sotheby’s said the painting could fetch up to £20m at the sale on 24 June.

It last sold at auction for £4.4m in 1994.

“This is one of Manet’s most famous subjects, and an absolute classic impressionist image of Parisian nightlife,” Sotheby’s Philip Hook said.

The painting remained in the artist’s personal collection up until his death when it was bought by an art dealer, and has remained in private hands since.

It is one of two versions of the same scene created by Manet. A later, larger version is in London’s Courtauld Gallery.

Last November Manet’s Spring – a portrait of a Parisian actress – set a new auction record for his work, selling for $65m (£42.6m) in New York.

Analysis – Will Gompertz, arts editor

Manet neither looked nor acted like a revolutionary. But he was. It was this polite middle-class man of Paris who precipitated the epoch-changing art of the Impressionists.

He was their mentor and hero. For it was Manet who stood up to the old-fashioned Paris Academy and refused to paint the pleasing pastiches of classical subjects it demanded.

Instead, he took up the challenge laid down by the writer Charles Baudelaire and became a painter of everyday life. This original portrayal of life at the risque Folies-Bergere is an example of Manet’s painterly gifts and radical tendencies.

His subject is a barmaid not a goddess, who is serving in a den of iniquity, not lying about in some mythical pastoral scene. The Academy would not have been impressed, but the city’s avant-garde would have cheered him all the way to the bar.

BBC