Kiss Renoir’s, Make Love to Picasso’s and Marry Monet’s Part 3

The Vowing Kind

Woman With a Parasol Facing Left
& Woman With a Parasol Facing Right
By Claude Monet

Claude Monet began the impressionist movement with his painting “Impression, Soleil Levant” in 1874. Monet was a devoted man, and by the 1870s had mostly given up on figures in his paintings, except to treat them as a piece of the landscape. Monet’s muses were the women of his house. His first wife, Camille Doncieux, was a model for Renoir and Manet as well as Monet. They married on June 28th, 1870, and she was his primary model, from 1865, until her death in 1879. Because of Monet’s marriage to Camille, he lost support from his family. Causing the Monet family, including their son Jean, to struggle financially. In 1876 Monet met Ernest Hoschede and his wife Alice and was commissioned to paint their chateau in south-east Paris, it is speculated that Monet and Alice began an affair at this time. In 1877 Ernest Hoschede went bankrupt and moved his family into Monet’s home in Vetheuil, with Camille and Monet’s two sons. It was around this time Camille’s health began to fail following the birth of their son Michel. When she passed in 1879 Ernest Hoschede was not financially supporting his wife Alice or his children, and they continued to live with Monet. Upon…