'The forgotten Monet'
How masterful paintings by the artist's stepdaughter
are finally getting recognition
Blanche Hoschedé-Monet has barely been acknowledged in art history. But not only did she help her stepfather Claude, she created her own fine works – often of the same scenes as him.
Haystack at Giverny, Poplars at the Water's Edge, Morning on the Seine. These painting titles bring only one name to mind – the great Claude Monet, whose flickering evocations of light and atmosphere are the cornerstone of Impressionism.
But while Monet painted these very subjects, the paintings belong to the oeuvre of his stepdaughter, and subsequently daughter-in-law, Blanche Hoschedé-Monet (1865–1947). She learned to paint at Monet's shoulder, and exhibited and sold her work through the leading Parisian dealers of the time. Her finest paintings suggest an artist of such flair that you wonder how she has slipped from history's grasp.
A new exhibition and accompanying monograph – the artist's first in English – seeks to restore her reputation. Blanche Hoschedé-Monet in the Light at The Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana, brings together 40 of her paintings, along with sketchbooks, photographs and letters, establishing not just her impressionist credentials, but her role as Monet's assistant and companion on plein air painting expeditions – the only one of his children, blood-related or otherwise, whose passion for painting mirrored his own.
The difficulty of extracting Hoschedé-Monet from history has been compounded by the fact that few of her 300-ish works are in public collections. In her native France, the former Musée Municipal de Vernon, near the Normandy village of Giverny, where the Monet family lived for decades, holds the largest number – eight paintings and one pastel – and was valiantly renamed the Musée Blanche Hoschedé-Monet last year to coincide with the 150th anniversary of Impressionism. Meanwhile Paris's Musée d'Orsay (widely regarded as the best collection of Impressionist art) has only a further two – neither of which, at the time of writing, is on display.
There are no Hoschedé-Monet paintings in British public collections at all, and in the US, only one, The Weeping Willows on the Lily Pond at Giverny (c 1893-7) at the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio. The Indiana exhibition is the artist's first solo show on US soil, in fact, and an indication that her reputation is finally growing.
Lucy Davies
