Lilla Cabot Perry

A successful painter at the turn of the twentieth century, Lilla Cabot Perry was instrumental in introducing  American audiences to the new French mode of painting called impressionism—the use of distinct strokes of bright color to capture the transient effects of light and atmosphere. Descended from old New England families, Lilla Cabot grew up in the rarified world of literary and cultural Boston and was early on attracted to poetry and art. In 1874 she married Thomas Sargeant Perry, a writer, teacher, authority on English literature, and brother-in-law of influential painter John La Farge. A published poet, Lilla began to paint seriously after the births of their three daughters. Self-taught, she had already begun exhibiting her paintings when she began studying late in 1885 at Boston’s Cowles Art School with painters Robert Vonnoh and Dennis Miller Bunker, leading members of Boston’s progressive artists’ community.

In 1887, the Perry family embarked on a two-year European tour, and Lilla studied in Paris at the Julian and Colarossi art academies. Two years later, she had two works accepted into the prestigious juried annual Paris exhibition known as the Salon. That summer, the Perrys first visited Giverny, the rural village in Normandy, France, which was just beginning to experience an influx of international artists. The presence of impressionist pioneer Claude Monet (1840–1926) made Giverny an important site for the introduction of the new aesthetic among these young artists. The French-speaking Perry established a lifelong friendship with Monet. She became a champion of his art and that of other French and American impressionist painters in her native Boston, where she organized exhibitions and influenced collectors. Perry herself adopted the more open brushwork and brighter, purer color of the mode in landscapes and figural works painted out-of-doors.

During the next two decades the Perrys spent many summers in Giverny. During long periods back in Boston, Lilla encouraged collectors’ interest in her impressionist friends’ work, made her home an influential gathering-place where visitors from Giverny mingled with Boston artistic and literary visitors, and took on portrait commissions to help support her family. Seven of her paintings were exhibited at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. She also published several volumes of her poetry. Between 1898 and 1901, the Perrys lived in Japan, where Thomas (a grand-nephew of Commodore Matthew C. Perry, who had forced Japan to open to trade with the West in 1853) was Professor of English at Keio Philanthropic School (now Keio University) in Tokyo. Lilla absorbed Asian influences into her art, and she is credited in turn with helping to introduce impressionism to Japan.

After the turn of the century, Perry exhibited widely, her figural works and portraits meeting a steady demand. Her interest in landscape painting revived with return summer visits to Giverny between 1905 and 1909 and with her purchase of a farm in Hancock, New Hampshire. Perry remained loyal to impressionism, even as the style became outmoded, and helped found the conservative Guild of Boston Artists in 1914 to combat perceived threats from modernist artistic ideas. In 1927, just after Monet’s death, Perry published her reminiscences of her friend. She continued to paint until just before her death at the age of eighty-six.