In the Woods at Giverny Blanche Hoschedé at Her Easel with Suzanne Hoschedé Reading

Claude Monet

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Keywords: WoodsGivernyBlancheHoschedéEaselSuzanneHoschedéReading

Work Overview

In the Woods at Giverny: Blanche Hoschedé at Her Easel with Suzanne Hoschedé Reading
Blanche Hoschede Painting and Suzanne Hoschede Reading
Suzanne Reading and Blanche Painting by the Marsh at Giverny
Claude Monet
1887
Oil on canvas
Canvas: 36 × 38 1/2 in. (91.44 × 97.79 cm) Frame: 47 × 49 1/2 × 2 1/2 in. (119.38 × 125.73 × 6.35 cm)
Mr. and Mrs. George Gard De Sylva Collection 
Los Angeles County Museum of Art


Blanche Hoschedé Monet (10 November 1865 – 8 December 1947) was a French painter who was both the stepdaughter and the daughter-in-law of Claude Monet.


Most of Blanche's works were done in Giverny from 1883 to 1897, which was similar to that of Monet's work, and around Rouen. She "adopted an almost pure form of impressionism."[2]


She painted landscapes with trees such as pines and poplars, and meadows along the Risle river. In the 1920s, she also painted on several occasions at Georges Clemenceau's property in Saint-Vincent-sur-Jard (Vendée department) in the west of France - paintings of the garden, house and the Atlantic Ocean.[2] After Monet's death, she remained in Giverny and continued painting. Recognizing her body of work, a street bears her name in the village of Giverny.[2]


Dr. Janine Burke believes that Blanche may have assisted Monet in the painting of the Grandes Décorations. Monet had trained and encouraged Blanche as an artist. In a chapter on Blanche and Monet in Source: Nature's Healing Role in Art and Writing (2009), Burke comments, "Given the sheer scale of the surfaces to be covered in the Grandes Décorations, it is logical to consider Monet had an assistant, and who better than Blanche?" 


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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Valentiner, William Reinhold.  The Mr. and Mrs. George Gard De Sylva Collection of French Impressionist and Modern Paintings and Sculpture.  Los Angeles:  Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1950.
Schaefer, Scott, et al. European Painting and Sculpture in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1987.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art Members' Calendar 1992,  vol. 29-30, no. 12-1 (December, 1991-January, 1993).
Stein, Susan Alyson and Asher Ethan Miller. The Annenberg collection: masterpieces of Impressionism and Post-impressionism, New ed. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art ; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.


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The background story is this: Ernest Hoschedé, the father of the girls in the painting and a great patron of the Impressionist movement, commissioned a series of paintings from Claude Monet, as the two were friends. During this time, Monet met Alice Hoschedé and they too started a “friendship” (which may or may not have been the conception of the youngest Hoschedé boy, Jean-Pierre). Ernest then hit hard economic times and took increasingly long trips to Paris before moving to Belgium without his family. Around the same time, the Monets moved in with Alice Hoschedé and her six children because Monet’s wife, Camille, was dying of cancer. After she died, Monet and Alice began a romantic relationship (shocker) despite the fact that she was still technically married to Ernest. But it was chill because they waited until Ernest was dead to actually get married even though they had been living together for almost 15 years at that point. 


But the weirdness does not stop there. One of Alice and Ernest’s daughters, Blanche Hoschedé (depicted in this painting), began a romance with American painter, John Leslie Breck, which was abruptly stopped by Monet even though he allowed another American painter, Theodore Earl Butler, to marry Blanche’s sister, Suzanne (also depicted in this painting). Blanche instead married one of Monet’s sons, Jean Monet even though they were step-brother and –sister, most likely shared a sibling and had been raised like siblings themselves. This story doesn’t quite rival the large-jawed, hemophiliac Hapsburgs but it certainly isn’t normal.


Putting all of this aside, one of the subjects of this painting, Blanche Hoschedé was also a great painter who followed the work of the Impressionists. Though she was not as great as her step-father/father-in-law Claude Monet, she made a name for herself by “adopting an almost pure form of Impressionism.” She later was known as Monet’s  “Blue Angel” who took care of him until he died in 1926.