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 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. 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 Monets' two sons, Jean and Michel. Ernest spent increasing lengths of time in Paris. He then lived in Paris and worked at le Voltaire.
There are times when Ernest Hoschedé returns to visit his wife and children at the successive Monet households of Vetheuil, Poissy and Giverny. During those times Monet leaves the household. The separation from Alice, though, leaves 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 had 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 in 1911.

Paintings of Alice

Some of the paintings of Alice Hoschedé Monet are:
portrayed Hoschedé in the 2006 BBC docudrama The Impressionists.