Alice Hoschedé

Alice Raingo Hoschedé Monet (February 19, 1844 – May 19, 1911) was the wife of department store magnate and art collector Ernest Hoschedé and later of the Impressionist painter Claude Monet.

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.

After meeting her future daughter-in-law in 1863, Ernest Hoschedé's mother wrote of Alice:

This young woman has wit, intelligence in plenty and, I believe, strength of will. Her conversation is easy, though I find her voice rather loud. She seemed to me more delicate and prettier than in her photograph.

Her children (by Ernest Hoschedé) were Blanche (who married Claude's son, Jean Monet), Germaine, Suzanne, Marthe, Jean-Pierre, and Jacques.

In 1876, 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 Hoschedé 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.

Monet's last campaign at Etretat coincides with the presence of Ernest Hoschedé at the birthday celebration of his wife at Giverny. Monet is "annihilated" by this development, and although he acknowledges that it would be better not to send Mme Hoschedé such a bleak account, he cannot resist acquainting her of his pain. Along with obsessive thoughts of her, Monet also claims to have unceasing concern for "our two little ones, so cute and nice". The reference is to Camille Monet's son Michel (b. 1878) and Alice Hoschedé's son Jean-Pierre (b. 1877); the implication here and elsewhere in the correspondence may be that Monet is the father of both.

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