Monet’s Stepdaughter Painted Breathtaking Impressionist Masterpieces. They’re Finally Getting the Attention They Deserve
Known as the “forgotten Monet,” Blanche Hoschedé-Monet created roughly 300 stunning artworks. She’s now getting her first-ever solo exhibition in the United States
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In art history, few names are as evocative as Claude Monet. The French artist is known for his swirling paintings of rivers, gardens, flowers and fields that would come to define the Impressionist movement.
But Monet wasn’t the only accomplished artist in his family. Blanche Hoschedé-Monet, his stepdaughter (and, later, his daughter-in-law) was a respected painter in her own right, working “not in the shadow, but in the light of Claude Monet,” as her brother Jean-Pierre Hoschedé wrote, according to Artnet’s Karen Chernick. However, her legacy has long been overlooked.
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Of her roughly 300 works, most remain in private hands. The Musée d’Orsay, which boasts the largest collection of Impressionist art in the world, has only two of her paintings, neither of which are on view, per the BBC’s Lucy Davies. American public collections have only one, while British public collections don’t have any. Aside from the Musée Blanche Hoschedé-Monet, a regional museum in Vernon, France, recently renamed in her honor, many museums and critics have relegated her to Monet’s long shadow.
That’s not the case at the Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University, which is staging “Blanche Hoschedé-Monet in the Light,” the first solo exhibition of Hoschedé-Monet’s work in the U.S.
“While Impressionism (and certainly Claude Monet) may be well-known, few recognize the achievements of Blanche Hoschedé-Monet,” Haley Pierce, a curator at the museum, says in a statement. “It is my hope that this exhibition contributes to an expanding narrative of this important artist and period in the history of modern art.”
Hoschedé-Monet was born in 1865 to Alice and Ernest Hoschedé, a wealthy Parisian businessman and art collector who counted himself among Impressionism’s leading supporters. It was Hoschedé who bought Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (1872), the painting that inspired the movement’s name.
When his daughter was just 11, Hoschedé commissioned Monet to paint decorative panels at the family’s country house. “I remember his arrival. He was introduced to me as a great artist, and he had long hair,” Hoschedé-Monet wrote years later, per the BBC. “That struck me, and I immediately had sympathy for him because we could tell he was fond of children.”
Not long after Monet completed his work at the house, the Hoschedé family fell into financial ruin. Ernest Hoschedé sold off most of his Impressionist art collection and both of his houses. In a magnanimous gesture, Monet allowed Ernest, Alice and their six children to move in with him, his wife and their two sons in Vétheuil, northwest of Paris.
Monet’s wife, Camille, died from postpartum complications soon thereafter, and Ernest became estranged from his wife, Alice. The two remaining adults in the large, blended family—Alice and Monet—entered “what we believe was a domestic partnership” for years until finally marrying in 1892, Pierce tells the BBC.
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During these years, Hoschedé-Monet trained as an artist under the tutelage of her stepfather. “They both went to the same locations and painted the same landscapes at the same time,” Keaton Evans-Black, an art therapist at the Eskenazi Museum, tells the Indiana Daily Student’s Abby Whited. She also helped carry his easels and paint supplies.
While Hoschedé-Monet owes aesthetic debts to her stepfather, her work is still distinct from his—even when the two painted the same exact scene.
For instance, Hoschedé-Monet painted her own version of Monet’s famous haystacks. “They’re at the same or approximate location, but she has distinctly chosen a different view,” says Pierce to the BBC. “Her painting is also more solid. She has less interest in the quality of atmosphere, and more in really getting down her subject. Her compositions are very well thought out.”
Five years after their parents married, Hoschedé-Monet married Jean Monet, the painter’s eldest son. She continued to gain recognition as an artist in the early 1900s and exhibited her work at prestigious salons in Paris.
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Hoschedé-Monet’s mother died in 1911. When her husband passed away three years later, she moved to Giverny to care for the aging Monet, supporting him through his final series of water lilies.
“Without her, Claude Monet would have lived in an isolation that would have killed him,” the art dealer René Gimpel once wrote, per the BBC. “It was she who kept him alive for us. Posterity must not forget her.”
“Blanche Hoschedé-Monet in the Light” is on view at the Eskenazi Museum of Art in Bloomington, Indiana, through June 15, 2025.
