Suzanne Hosched-Monet Sewing

John Leslie Breck was one of the first American artists to visit Giverny and to adopt the Impressionist style of painting. He was the first Americans to exhibit works created there.

Breck discovered Giverny, the home of the French Impressionist Claude Monet, in 1887 and spent a great deal of time in the small French village over the next five years.

Breck was one of the few American artists to befriend Monet and his family. The subject of this painting is Monet's step-daughter Suzanne Hoschedé. It is one of the earliest examples of the artist's conversion to the Impressionist style.

Breck thought highly of it, including it in a rare photograph of his studio in Giverny as well as in the important exhibition of his first Impressionist paintings, held in Boston in 1890.

When the museum acquired "Suzanne Hoschedé-Monet Sewing" in 2016, it was housed in a relatively recently made frame in the elaborate Louis XIV style. Dealers started using such frames for Impressionist paintings not long after the movement began in the mid-19th century as a way of offsetting the modernity of this new style with a surrounding that was more familiar to viewers.

Artists themselves had other ideas, and we know that Breck originally intended for this painting to be seen in a simpler molding based on how it appears in the period photograph of his studio. Using the photograph as a guide, the Mint worked with a period frame dealer to find a historically accurate French frame similar to the long-lost one that Breck originally had chosen.