Alice Hoschedé
Alice Raingo Hoschedé Monet was the wife of department store magnate and art collector Ernest Hoschedé and later of the Impressionist painter Claude Monet.
Early life
According to unsourced genealogical data reported by Michael Legrand, she was born Angélique Émilie Alice Raingo on February 19, 1844, in Paris to Belgian born Denis Lucien Alphonse Raingo and his wife Jeanne Coralie Boulade.Marriage to Ernest Hoschedé
After meeting her future daughter-in-law in 1863, Ernest Hoschedé's mother wrote of Alice:Her children were Blanche, Germaine, Suzanne, Marthe, Jean-Pierre, and Jacques.
Life with the Monet family
In 1876, Ernest Hoschedé commissioned Monet to paint decorative panels for the Château de Rottembourg and several landscape paintings. The four panels representing Les Dindons , l'Étang à Montgeron '', Coin de Jardin à Montgeron and La Chasse were however never installed in the rotunda of the château.According to the Nineteenth-century European Art: A Topical Dictionary, it may have been during this visit that Monet began a relationship with Alice and her youngest son, Jean-Pierre, may have been fathered by Monet.
Ernest Hoschedé went bankrupt in 1877. Ernest, Alice, and their children moved into a house in Vétheuil with Monet, Monet's first wife Camille, and the Monet's two sons, Jean and Michel. Ernest spent increasing lengths of time in Paris. He then lived in Paris and worked at le Voltaire.
There were times when Ernest Hoschedé returned to visit his wife and children at the successive Monet households of Vétheuil, Poissy and Giverny. During those times Monet left the household. The separation from Alice, though, left Monet greatly distressed, experiencing nightmares, and generally unable to paint.
Before the Monet and Hoschedé families had moved to Poissy, Ernest Hoschedé had refused to pay his share of the upkeep for Alice and the children. In 1886 he showed up and demanded that his wife and children return with him to Paris, but Alice remained with Monet.
Relationship with Claude Monet
After Camille Monet's death in 1879, Monet and Alice continued living together at Poissy and later at Giverny. Still married to Ernest Hoschedé and living with Claude Monet, the Le Gaulois newspaper in Paris declared that she was Monet's "charming wife" in 1880.Ernest Hoschedé died in 1891 and Alice agreed to marry Monet in 1892.
Alice died on 19 May 1911. Her death deeply affected the painter. On the night of her death, he wrote to his friend, Gustave Geffroy, a French art historian and novelist: This letter is on display in one of the rooms of Fondation Monet in Giverny.
Paintings of Alice
Some of the paintings of Alice Hoschedé Monet are:- Claude Monet, Breakfast under the Tent, Giverny, 1888
- John Singer Sargent, Mme Hoschedé and Her Son in Monet's Garden, Giverny, 1888
- John Singer Sargent, Claude Monet Painting by the Edge of the Wood, 1885 or 1888