Claude Monet | The Stroller (Suzanne Hoschede), 1887 | Masterpiece

This painting of Suzanne Hoschedé in the meadows just south of Le Pressoir, Monet's home at Giverny, was probably made in the summer of 1887.

She became Monet's preferred model in the period after the death of his first wife, Camille, in 1879, and before 1890, when he gave up plein-air figure painting.

The model was the daughter of Alice Hoschedé, whom Monet married in 1892. | Source: © Metropolitan Museum of Art

Theodore Robinson | The Wedding March, 1892

The wedding procession of Suzanne Hoschedé and Theodore Earl Butler

Suzanne Hoschedé (1868-1899) was one of the daughters of Alice Hoschedé and Ernest Hoschedé, the stepdaughter and favorite model of French impressionist painter Claude Monet, and wife of American impressionist painter Theodore Earl Butler.

Suzanne is known as The Woman with a Parasol in Monet's painting of 1886.

In 1878 Monet and his family temporarily moved into the home of Ernest Hoschedé (1837-1891), a wealthy department store owner and patron of the arts.

Claude Monet | The Woman with a Parasol, 1886

Suzanne Hoschedé posed for this and many other paintings by Monet

Both families then shared a house in Vétheuil during the summer. Hoschedé became bankrupt, and left in 1878 for Belgium.

After the death of Monet's wife Camille in September 1879, and while Monet continued to live in the house in Vétheuil, Hoschedé's wife Alice (1844-1911) helped Monet to raise his two sons, Jean and Michel, by taking them to Paris to live alongside her own six children.

They were Blanche Hoschedé Monet (who eventually married Jean Monet); Germaine; Suzanne Hoschedé; Marthe; Jean-Pierre; and Jacques.

John Leslie Breck | Suzanne Hoschedé-Monet Sewing, 1888

In the spring of 1880, Alice Hoschedé and all the children left Paris and rejoined Monet, still living in the house in Vétheuil.

In 1881, all of them moved to Poissy, which Monet hated.

In April 1883, looking out the window of the little train between Vernon and Gasny, he discovered Giverny.

Claude Monet | Blanche Hoschedé at Her Easel with Suzanne Hoschedé Reading, 1887 | Los Angeles County Museum of Art

They next moved to Vernon, then to a house in Giverny, Eure, in Upper Normandy, where he planted a large garden and where he painted for much of the rest of his life.

Following the death of her estranged husband in 1891, Alice Hoschedé married Claude Monet in 1892 on July 16.