Impressionism has always been a fan favorite, and when the French movement marked its 150th birthday last year, museums worldwide feted it with one exhibition after another. Loosely painted landscapes by Claude Monet, a leading founder of the movement, were all over the place (even more so than usual). Artworks by the other Monet? Not so much.
In fact, the other Monet—Blanche Hoschedé-Monet, that is—has never had a solo exhibition in the United States (though she’s had a few in her native France). Only one public American institution, Ohio’s Columbus Museum of Art, has her work on view and the French museums that hold her landscape paintings mostly keep them in storage. Until now. When “Blanche Hoschedé-Monet in the Light” opens at the Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University on February 14, the show and accompanying catalogue will be the first monographic study of her in the U.S.
“Why is the talent of Blanche Hoschedé, which has not been in doubt for some time, still ignored?” asked her younger brother Jean-Pierre Hoschedé in the preface to a 1960 exhibition of her work at Charles E. Slatkin Galleries in New York. “It is easy to answer these questions: a) because Blanche Hoschedé never had the slightest ambition; b) because being Claude Monet’s daughter-in-law was precisely why she never benefitted from his protection, nor from the great name that also became hers; c) because she painted solely for her own pleasure.”
Hoschedé-Monet was at the center of an international artist colony active in Giverny in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and painted around 300 works in her lifetime. Still, it was her connection to Monet that defined her life and continues to overshadow her work to this day. Complicating matters, her paintings kind of look like his.
“Right off the bat, they do resemble closely Monet’s paintings,” said Haley Pierce, assistant curator of European art at the Eskenazi Museum of Art and organizer of this exhibition. “When you see Hoschedé-Monet’s work in person you can parse out those differences.”
Hoschedé-Monet received much of her training from Monet but developed stylistic independence. She would work in sequences, for example, painting the same subject from different viewpoints. This differed from how Monet painted series of the same motif, for example at different times of day.
On occasions when the two artists went out to paint en plein air together and set up their easels around the same subject, the resulting canvases look different. “She’s not attempting to paint the same exact thing,” noted Pierce. “She’s really trying to make the composition her own.” Hoschedé-Monet’s compositions tend to be more planned out and balanced, as opposed to Monet who was more atmospheric, capturing an ephemeral moment.
Not only was her work divergent from Monet’s, but it stood out relative to female peers such as Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot. Hoschedé-Monet was almost entirely a landscape painter working outdoors. “It’s even more impressive that she was doing these ambitious plein air paintings because often times you see with women artists, especially of the later 19th century, that they’re looking at subjects within the home and less so aggressively out in the landscape,” Pierce said.
Hoschedé-Monet started painting outdoor landscapes in 1882, and when her family moved to Giverny the next year she began joining Monet on his countryside walks and painting outings. She would “[transport] his canvases and easel as well as her own,” wrote her brother in his 1961 biography of her. “She did it all with the help of a wheelbarrow, following elusive paths, across fields and meadows sometimes drenched in dew. That was the case, for example, with his morning views of the Seine. Here again, she would help her stepfather by taking up the oars of the canoe.”
The story of how Blanche and Claude first met and the twists and turns of their relationship is a saga in and of itself. As a child Blanche grew up surrounded by the modern art collection of her father, Ernest Hoschedé, and when she was 11 years old her father commissioned a 35-year-old Monet to paint decorative panels for the living room at their summer home. A few years later, when Hoschedé had financial difficulties and had to sell off his collection and properties, Monet invited the entire family to come live with him and his wife and two sons in Vétheuil—resulting in a sort of French blended family composed of four adults and eight kids.
Monet’s wife Camille, who had been in poor health, died in 1879. In parallel, the Hoschedés became estranged with Ernest living away from the family. Within a few years, Monet and Alice Hoschedé became domestic partners and officially married after Ernest died. This made Blanche, for a time, Monet’s stepdaughter. That is, until she married Monet’s oldest son Jean in 1897—making Monet both her stepfather and father-in-law.
Of all eight kids in that blended and intertwined clan, it was Blanche who inherited an interest in art-making. And she was the one who cared for Monet in his later years when his health declined, supporting him as he worked on Water Lilies and maintaining the Giverny home after his death as a testament to his creative legacy. Visitors to Monet’s home and gardens, to this day, have Blanche to thank.
The year after Monet died, Hoschedé-Monet had her first-ever solo exhibition in November 1927 at Galerie Bernheim-Jeune. A second show followed in 1931 and she continued exhibiting at the Parisian Salon des Indépendants and the Salon de Vernon, with critics taking greater interest in her work. As her brother Jean-Pierre wrote, Hoschedé-Monet was “not in the shadow, but in the light of Claude Monet.”
The city of Vernon, near Giverny, has continued to bolster her legacy. Hoschedé-Monet and her family left her paintings to various French museums with the Musée Municipal de Vernon holding the largest public collection of her work (at eight paintings and one pastel). Coinciding with last year’s 150th anniversary of Impressionism, the museum renamed itself the Musée Blanche Hoschedé-Monet to honor this regional artist.
“There’s a lot of work that has still yet to be discovered,” said Pierce of piecing together Hoschedé-Monet’s work in preparation for the show opening at the Eskenazi Museum. “This will be a really rare opportunity to see a lot of the works together for the first time.”
“Blanche Hoschedé-Monet in the Light” is on view at the Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University, 1133 E 7th St, Bloomington, Indiana, February 14–June 15.
