'Put yourself in my hands' Manet is revealed as world-class mansplainer

Almost 140 years before a term was belatedly coined for the practice of men patronisingly setting women right on how certain things ought to be seen or done, it seems that a certain French painter had already become adept at the art of what must be called Manetsplaining.

- Sam Jones

Details of this late 19th-century case of mansplaining are laid out in a new book by the Pulitzer prize-winning Washington Post art critic Sebastian Smee, which explores how Impressionism emerged as a response to the siege of Paris and the attendant civil and political tumult of the time.

In the book, Paris in Ruins: Love, War and the Birth of Impressionism, Smee gives an account of an incident involving Édouard Manet and his friend and fellow painter Berthe Morisot, who would eventually marry Manet's younger brother, Eugène.

An excerpt published in the Art Newspaper reveals how Morisot - who is considered one of the great Impressionists - was working on a portrait of her mother and sister that she intended to submit to the Salon of 1870 when Manet called at her home and offered to help out.