The story
Blanche Hoschedé was the only one of the eight children in Claude Monet's blended household at Giverny who became a painter. She often worked outdoors beside her stepfather, later married his son Jean, and in 2024 the town museum of Vernon, five kilometres from Giverny, was renamed after her. Her views of Monet's house and pond hang here.
So do two pictures by Monet himself. One is a round canvas of water lilies from 1908, an early form of the idea he later carried into the great water-lily rooms of the Orangerie in Paris, given to the museum in 1925 while he was still alive. The other, a cliff at Pourville at sunset from 1896, was given in 1964 by his younger son Michel, in memory of Michel's wife.
The museum began in 1862 with a gift of about 2,000 stuffed birds, and since 1983 it has occupied a 15th-century town house in the old centre. That mix still shows. Alongside the Giverny painters there are landscapes by Pierre Bonnard, who lived in Vernon from 1912, a large group of works by the illustrator Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, and a gallery of animal art with sculpture by François Pompon and Rembrandt Bugatti.
