Thomas Sergeant Perry Reading a Newspaper

Unaware of the viewer, seventy-nine-year-old Thomas Sergeant Perry sits in an upholstered wing chair reading a folded newspaper in Lilla Cabot Perry’s intimate, informal image of her husband. Soft light penetrates from a curtained window at the right, striking the angular contours of the sitter’s slender wrist. The bold blue-and-white pattern of the chair contrasts with the calm mood of this domestic scene. Thomas Sergeant Perry Reading a Newspaper flirts with formal portraiture, but the partial obscuring of the subject’s face by the newspaper and his downcast gaze result instead in a casually caught glimpse of everyday life.

Three years older than Lilla, Thomas Perry was a well-respected literary critic and scholar of English literature who, like his wife, had familial ties to Boston's historical, literary, and artistic worlds. He was a direct descendant of Benjamin Franklin and a grand-nephew of Commodore Matthew Perry, who forced Japan to open to the West in 1853. He was also a close childhood friend of writer Henry James and a brother-in-law of painter John La Farge. Never financially successful, Thomas partly depended on his wife’s income from portrait-painting to support their family of three daughters. The marriage was a happy one. Lilla, a published poet, shared her husband's interest in literature and Thomas was as gregarious as his wife. Their homes, whether in Boston or in France, became social centers for artistic and literary acquaintances. Lilla painted Thomas in at least one other painting, an 1889 work (private collection) in which he also is shown reading. Thomas Sergeant Perry Reading a Newspaper was made during the artist’s long convalescence from diphtheria and following the sudden death of their granddaughter Edith Grew in the spring of 1924. It foreshadowed the seventy-six-year-old painter’s departure from the busy scene of commissioned portraiture.

Decades earlier, Lilla Perry adopted the open, fluid brushstrokes and bright color of impressionism. Thomas Sergeant Perry Reading a Newspaper demonstrates her tendency to fuse these techniques to solid modeling of the figure convincingly inhabiting three-dimensional space. Throughout the canvas, series of small brushstrokes in harmonious tones create a unifying texture over the varied surfaces of cloth, wall, paper, and flesh. The use of indirect natural light from a window, the serene mood of genteel domesticity, and the cool overall color scheme, if not the sense of unified surface texture, are characteristic of a school of modified impressionist painting that flourished particularly in Boston at the turn of the twentieth century. By the 1920s, Perry’s style and approach as demonstrated in this portrait were distinctly conservative, in keeping with an artist who a decade earlier had been instrumental in founding The Guild of Boston Artists, a bastion of genteel values in an art scene rocked by the advent of modernism.

Lilla Cabot Perry: An American Impressionist, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. (organizer). Venue: National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C., September 28, 1990–January 6, 1991. [exh. cat.]

On Process: Studio Themes, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizer). Venue: Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, January 13–March 4, 2001.

American Classics from the Collection, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizer). Venue: Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, May 14–June 15, 2003.

Visages de l'Amérique: de George Washington à Marilyn Monroe (Faces of America: From George Washington to Marilyn Monroe), Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France (organizer). Venue: Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France, April 1–October 31, 2004. [exh. cat.]

Twarze Ameryki: Portrety z kolekcji Terra Foundation for American Art, 1770–1940 (Faces of America: Portraits from the collection of the Terra Foundation for American Art, 1770–1940), Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France and Miedzynarodowe Centrum Kultury (International Cultural Center), Crakow, Poland (organizers). Venue: International Cultural Center, Crakow, Poland, February 15–May 7, 2006. [exh. cat.]

L'Arte della Donna dal Rinascimento al Surrealismo, Artematica, s.r.l., Treviso, Italy (organizer). Venue: Palazzo Reale, Milan, Italy, December 5, 2007–April 6, 2008. [exh. cat.]

Martindale, Meredith. Lilla Cabot Perry: An American Impressionist. (exh. cat., National Museum of Women in the Arts). Washington, D.C.: National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1990. Text pp. 84, 86, no. 64, p. 156; pl. 46, p. 87 (color).

Gerdts, William H. et al. Lasting Impressions: American Painters in France, 1865–1915. (exh. cat., Musée d'Art Américain Giverny). Chicago, Illinois: Terra Foundation for the Arts, 1992. Text p. 59; fig. 50, p. 59 (black & white).

Gerdts, William H. et al. Impressions de toujours: les peintres américains en France, 1865–1915. (exh. cat., Musée d'Art Américain Giverny). Chicago, Illinois: Terra Foundation for the Arts, 1992. Text p. 59; fig. 50, p. 59 (black & white).

Lévy, Sophie, et al. Twarze Ameryki: Portrety z kolekcji Terra Foundation for American Art, 1770–1940/Faces of America: Portraits from the collection of the Terra Foundation for American Art, 1770–1940. (exh. cat. International Cultural Center). Cracow, Poland: International Cultural Center, 2006. Ill. front cover (color), p. 100 (color).

Sgarbi, Vittorio et al. L'Arte delle Donne dal Rinascimento al Surrealismo. (exh. cat., Palazzo Reale, Milan, Italy). Milan, Italy: Federico Motta Editore, 2007. Text p. 359; ill. p. 240 (color as Thomas Sargeant Perry mentre legge il giornale).

Muto, Shuji. American Literature and Culture at the Turn of the Century. Tokyo, Japan: Chuo University Press, 2008. Ill. p. 95 (black & white).