The work will be included in the catalogue raisonné of Blanche Hoschedé Monet currently being prepared by Philippe Piguet. The lot is accompanied by his certificate of authenticity under the reference BHM 62-4.

(source: Heritage Auction)

Blanche Hoschedé-Monet spent her childhood summers at the Château de Rottembourg in Montgeron, and it was there, in July 1876, that she first met Claude Monet, her future stepfather and mentor. Blanche's father, Ernest Hoschedé, was a wealthy department store magnate and art collector who commissioned Monet to paint four decorative panels for his dining room. This proved to be a transformative commission for Monet, who went on to complete a large group of decorative works, including Les Dindons (Musée d'Orsay, Paris). As the daughter of an important patron, Blanche encountered several leading Impressionists, including Édouard Manet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, but her close relationship with Monet and his work-of which her father owned around twenty canvases-defined her early years. Blanche became particularly close to the artist when, after her father's bankruptcy in 1877 (which resulted in the auction of his collection), Monet invited Ernest, Blanche's mother Alice, and all six of their children (including Blanche) to live with his family in Vétheuil. Ernest was frequently away, and after Monet's wife Camille died in 1879, the artist and Alice formed a romantic relationship and domestic partnership (they later married in 1892 after Ernest's death). At the time, Blanche was thirteen and the only one of the Hoschedé children to pursue art sreiously.

By 1883, when the Hoschedé and Monet families moved to Giverny, Blanche began to paint seriously, accompanying Monet to work en plein air. In his biography of his sister, Jean-Pierre Hoschedé recalls that Blanche assisted Monet in all circumstances-whether in the studio, in the garden, or accompanying him to various sites-transporting his canvases and easel as well as her own. "She did it all with the help of a wheelbarrow, following elusive paths across fields and meadows, sometimes drenched in dew" (J.-P. Hoschedé, Blanche Hoschedé-Monet, peintre impressionniste, Rouen, 1961, p. 12, as quoted in Olmsted, p. 17).

Given her formative personal and working relationship with the artist, Blanche's compositions of the 1880s, such as Au bord de l'Epte, bear a close resemblance to Monet's work. She was certainly not a copyist, however, but rather deeply influenced by the Impressionist aesthetic of the artists her father collected and, most importantly, by Monet's foundational example. When Blanche began painting in the early 1880s, without academic training, she chose subjects from her own life-of which Monet was such an important part-yet developed a distinct visual identity and personal style. The present work depicts the river near Giverny, a site Monet famously painted in his Peupliers au bord de l'Epte series of 1891; however, rather than capturing the fleeting effects of nature, Blanche's denser brushwork and more saturated palette suggest a direct, sustained engagement with her environment.

In the recent monographic exhibition catalogue, Philippe Piguet notes that Blanche's marked horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines-such as the tall-standing trees and their reflections in the present work-create a compositional structure that "seems to give the sense of being present before the motif, which the artist strived to reproduce through her sensitivity to the subject" (P. Piguet, "In the Light of Claude Monet," in Blanche Hoschedé-Monet: In the Light, exh. cat., 2025, p. 59). Vibrant and bold, yet sensitive and personal, compositions such as Au bord de l'Epte powerfully illustrate that, as her brother believed, Blanche was "not in the shadow, but in the light of Claude Monet" (J.-P. Hoschedé, Rouen, 1961, title page inscription, as quoted in Piguet, p. 55).