PERRY, LILLA CABOT

born Jan. 13, 1848, Boston, Mass., U.S. died Feb. 28, 1933, Hancock, N.H. ne Lilla Cabot American artist of the Impressionist movement who promoted that school of art in the United States through her writing and lectures as well as her own painting. 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. Their family soon included 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. It may have been the latter who urged her to study painting. Starting with private lessons in 1886, she attended Boston's Cowles School of Art. Her success as a portraitist enabled her to earn first-class passage to Paris for her family in June 1887. On this trip abroad Perry studied at two French academies and with the English painter Alfred Stevens. The most important influence on her artistic development, however, came from her relationship with the Impressionist Claude Monet. For many years the Perry family summered in Giverny, France, near Monet's home. Monet suggested that Perry commit to canvas rather than a sketchbook her first impression of a scene. Not only did Perry master Impressionist technique, she helped introduce Impressionism to the United States. Having returned to Boston with Monet's Etretat, Perry encouraged interest in him and the other Impressionists by lecturing and publishing essays on Impressionism and by urging her friends to purchase other Monet paintings. From 1893 to 1901, while Perry's husband taught English literature in Tokyo, Perry painted more than 80 pictures of Japanese scenes. She also incorporated Japanese and Chinese painting techniques. Like other Impressionists, she found subjects for her painting both in landscapes and in ordinary moments in her environment. The paintings of her later period have as their subject the landscape near Hancock, New Hampshire.