Britain's first registered trademark appears in a Manet

Bass, a brewery in Burton upon Trent, had been putting a red triangle on its casks of pale ale since well before 1855. After 1855 the triangles came in red, white or blue, depending on which of the company's three breweries the beer came from. Every bottle of Bass Pale Ale carried the red one. By 1877 Bass was the largest brewery in the world, making a million barrels a year, and its pale ale was shipped all over the British Empire.

Since 1862 it had been a crime in Britain to imitate another firm's trademark in order to defraud. But a firm could not formally register its mark until the Trade Marks Registration Act of 1875 set up a register at the Patent Office. Registration opened on January 1, 1876.

According to legend, a Bass employee spent New Year's Eve queuing outside the registrar's office so that he would be first in line in the morning. Bass ended up with the first six registrations. Number 1 was the red triangle for its pale ale, and number 2 was a red diamond for its strong ale. Numbers 3 to 6 were later abandoned.

In 1882 Édouard Manet showed A Bar at the Folies-Bergère at the Paris Salon. The barmaid in it was a real person, known as Suzon, who worked at that Paris nightclub, and Manet had her pose in his studio. On the bar in front of her stand beer bottles that can be identified as Bass Pale Ale by the red triangles on their labels. A British beer where a German one might have stood has been read as a sign of anti-German feeling in France in the decade after the Franco-Prussian War.

The triangle turned up in art again. Pablo Picasso put Bass bottles in more than 40 paintings, mostly around 1914, at the height of his Cubist period. In James Joyce's Ulysses, Leopold Bloom notices the Bass logo in the episode called "Oxen of the Sun."

In June 2013 InBev, the brewing company that by then owned the brand, gave Bass Pale Ale a new name: Bass Trademark No. 1.