American Art of the Week: For nineteen weeks from January through June 2016, I featured one painting by an American artist every Wednesday. Each entry includes a different work along with a paragraph or two about the artwork, its artist, and why I enjoy it. Click here to see all the posts.
Lilla Cabot Perry (1848-1933) was an American Impressionist painter who gained inspiration from a wide variety of sources as a result of her world travels. She was most heavily influenced by Claude Monet and other French artists in his circle, but she also lived and studied art in several other European nations as well as in Japan, the aesthetics of which held a strong fascination for Perry and many of her Impressionist colleagues. She exhibited in many important exhibitions both in the United States and abroad. Monet’s influence on Perry is most strongly apparent in her work, particularly in many of the same Giverny scenes that Monet painted, but I see touches of Cezanne and other of her French contemporaries in her art as well. Mary Cassatt is the better-known famous American female artist of this period, but I find Perry’s work to be more compelling. This painting depicts Perry’s daughter Edith, who was born in 1880.
Source: Lilla Cabot Perry profile at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.