Perry, Lilla Cabot

▪ American artist

original name  Lilla Cabot 

born January 13, 1848, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.

died February 28, 1933, Hancock, New Hampshire

      American artist who emulated the innovations of French Impressionism in her own art. She was also a major promoter of Impressionism in the United States.

      Lilla Cabot was a descendant not only of the Boston Brahmin Cabot family but also of the equally distinguished Lowells. In 1874 she married Thomas Sergeant Perry, a professor of 18th-century literature at Harvard University. The couple had three daughters, who would become frequent models for their mother's paintings. The Perry home became an intellectual salon for such writers as Henry James and William Dean Howells and for Lilla Perry's brother-in-law, artist John La Farge (La Farge, John). It may have been the latter who urged her to study painting. Starting with private lessons in 1886, she attended the Cowles School of Art in Boston. She and her family traveled to Paris in June 1867. On this trip abroad Perry studied at the Académie Julian and at the Académie Colarossi with the English painter Alfred Stevens.

      The most important influence on her artistic development, however, came from her relationship with the Impressionist painter Claude Monet (Monet, Claude). For many years the Perry family summered in Giverny, France, near Monet's home, and he became a friend and mentor to Perry. Monet suggested that Perry commit her first impression of a scene to canvas rather than to sketchbook. Through such lessons Perry mastered Impressionist techniques. After returning to Boston with one of Monet's images of Etretat, France, Perry encouraged American interest in him and the other Impressionists by lecturing and publishing essays on the movement and by urging her friends to purchase Monet's paintings.

      From 1893 to 1901, Perry lived in Tokyo where her husband taught English literature. During this period she painted more than 80 pictures of Japanese scenes, incorporating Japanese and Chinese painting techniques into her work. Like other Impressionists, she found subjects for her painting both in landscapes and in ordinary daily activities. The paintings of her later period feature landscapes near Hancock, New Hampshire.

Additional Reading

Meredith Martindale, Lilla Cabot Perry: An American Impressionist (1990).

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