The Courtauld Gallery

This guide to the Courtauld Gallery in London centers on Édouard Manet's final major painting, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, painted the year before he died in 1883 with a Paris barmaid named Suzon as his model. It follows the strange mirror behind her, debated by critics for a century, and the painting's path afterward, from a composer's piano to the silk magnate Samuel Courtauld, who built his Impressionist collection here in the 1920s when most of Britain dismissed the movement.