A Bar at the Folies-Bergère featured on BBC Radio 4’s Moving Pictures

Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, one of the masterpieces in The Courtauld’s collection, featured on BBC Radio 4’s Moving Pictures programme on Tuesday 1 November.

Listeners were invited to discover the secrets and delights of this iconic painting in an episode that took us to Paris in the 1880s and the popular music hall, the Folies-Bergère.

This celebrated work was Manet’s last major painting, completed a year before he died, and exhibited in 1882 at the Salon (the official annual exhibition of the French Academy of Fine Arts). In A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, Manet created a complex, absorbing composition and one of the iconic paintings of modern life.

Each episode of Moving Pictures is devoted to a single artwork, and the audience is invited to look as well as listen by exploring a high-resolution image of the artwork, made by Google Arts & Culture.

Listen again to the episode on BBC Sounds.