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 inevitably be called Manetsplaining.
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.
Knowing that she was feeling “dubious” about the picture, Manet had already told her: “You may put yourself in my hands. I shall tell you what needs to be done.”
What Manet did next, according to Smee, “was so painful to Morisot that it stayed with her for years”.
Despite an initially positive reaction to the painting, Manet concluded that a lower part of one of the dresses in it wasn’t quite working.
“Before she could say anything, he picked up her brushes and put in ‘a few accents’,” Smee writes, citing an account of the episode that Morisot gave to her sister Edma, who was also a painter.
“Once started, nothing could stop him; from the skirt he went to the bust, from the bust to the head, from the head to the background,” Morisot recalled.
“He cracked a thousand jokes, laughed like a madman, handed me the palette, took it back; finally, by five o’clock in the afternoon we had made the prettiest caricature that was ever seen.”
As the carter tasked with transporting the painting from the studio to the Salon jury was waiting, Manet encouraged her to dispatch the work forthwith.
“And now I am left confounded,” Morisot wrote. “My only hope is that I shall be rejected.” Her mother, she added, was “in ecstasies”, finding it all very amusing, “but I find it agonising”.
The art of Morisot, who died of pneumonia at the age of 54 in 1895, examined what the art critic Laura Cumming has described as an “infinitely subtle and secretive” world of women.
Reviewing an exhibition of Morisot’s paintings in London last year, Cumming noted that her work had little in common with her male contemporaries.
“It would be hard to think of an impressionist with a more evanescent and shifting technique, more absorbingly strange and indeterminate surfaces, into which you look as if seeking clues to the ever-changing movements of a mind,” she wrote in the Observer. “Morisot never settles into a trademark look, a fixed and recognisable style.”
In the same review, Cumming recalls what Manet wrote when he first met the Morisot sisters in 1868 and realised that their talent was likely to be dismissed by the male establishment. “What a shame,” said Manet, “they are not men.”
